Untangling uranium

Abstract

Professor Gabrielle Hecht is the Frank Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security at Stanford University. She is the author of research that explores our atomic world, including Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012) and The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (1998 & 2009). She has recently published Toxic Tales from the African Anthropocene, a collection of essays that analyse the entanglement of radioactive and other types of waste in Africa. Hecht’s work on uranium communities is arguably unparalleled in its scope and significance. While unveiling and deconstructing uranium’s role in a globalised and militarised world, she has undertaken a meaningful exploration of its linkages from local injustice to planetary scale. Her work extends across and beyond nuclear fuel to explore the global circulation and regulation of the nuclear. It creates new understandings of the ‘nuclear condition’ and the constitutive role of nuclearism in the formation of national identity (Hecht, 2012). It reveals nuclearity to be an imbricated, shifting and unstable subject – a socio-culturally critical mass. Dr Becky Alexis-Martin talks with Professor Gabrielle Hecht about her motivations for understanding the networks that surround uranium, and its entangled significance to our unevenly distributed Anthropocene.