Abstract
Book Review: <i>Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty</i>, by Rahul Mukherjee
Highlights
The central theme in Radiant Infrastructures is the role of media and mediation in producing infrastructure as an affective and epistemological object
The book is set in contemporary India and follows the medial routes of cellular towers and nuclear reactors, two communication and energy infrastructures that are never treated together
The author shows that it is in this entanglement of multiple human and nonhuman medial relations, as well as “interhuman social connections,” that “environmental publics” emerge as an arena of political interactions where the nature, affects and effects, and futures of cellular and nuclear infrastructures in India are negotiated
Summary
Using the evocative notion of “radiance,” Mukherjee entangles them both conceptually and empirically, scrutinizing their similarities and differences, and the ways in which mediation brings up their radiating properties in ways that give traction to civic, scientific and political debates, environmental controversies and agency. Taking this contradiction as a central point for his analysis, Mukherjee tracks the role that media plays in shaping vivid debates over the hazardous footprints of nuclear energy and wireless communication and the ways in which ordinary citizens, politicians, and experts encounter and make sense of them through various forms of mediation.
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