“Human Rights and Nuclear Wrongs” – guest lecture by Dr. Linda Marie Richards
On Thursday, July 28, 2022, our current visiting scholar, Dr. Linda Marie Richards (Oregon State University) will be giving a guest lecture titled:
An Auto/Ethnography of Human Rights and Nuclear Wrongs
The event takes place at 18:00 CEST and will be livestreamed via Zoom (registration).
Linda Marie Richards in an instructor in history at Oregon State University. She received her PhD in 2014 for a dissertation on “Rocks and Reactors: An Atomic Interpretation of Human Rights, 1941–1979.” Her research in nuclear history has appeared in Peace & Change, the Chemical Heritage Magazine, and Historia Scientiarum, among other venues.
Abstract:
In 1986, I set out with the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament to walk across the USA from Los Angeles to DC. What I learned from Hopi, Dine (Navajo), Pueblo, and Shoshone elders directed me to live in protest ever since. I want to know why scientists and decision makers, who were willing to embrace eugenics to prevent the white race from being “contaminated” by other cultures, risked the actual contamination of all beings from radiation and fallout during massive nuclear weapons tests. Pollution from nuclear technologies and tests occurred long before the effects of radiation were properly understood. Today, new researchers are investigating how radiation regulation protection regimes were developed. Academics and scientists are studying the physical and socio-emotional consequences for those exposed in terms of their lived experience. Planetary-scale harms, such as the possible acceleration of the climate crisis due to the effects of the equivalence of 35,000 Hiroshimas worldwide from nuclear tests are now being broached. My work asks, how are eugenics, white supremacy, and nuclear pollution related to what we think of as human rights and the climate crisis? Where does the United Nations, radiation, and the work for human rights regimes fit? These are questions that drive my research in my forthcoming environmental humanities book on Human Rights and Nuclear Wrongs for West Virginia University Press’s Energy and Society series.