A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado is a digital public humanities project documenting and interpreting the sites, issues, policies, and cultures associated with the American nuclear weapons complex.
Atlas website: https://www.coloradonuclearatlas.org/
With more than 40 contributors to date, the Atlas collects and cross-references many types of knowledge, affective registers, and forms of evidence in an open-source repository of interactive data sets. These include maps, photographs, and descriptions of major and minor nuclear sites; issue briefs offering historical and policy contexts; artworks responding to nuclear legacies; and scholarly essays connecting atomic histories to environmental justice, technoscientific practice, formations of nuclear citizenry, and political hegemony. The project focuses on the state of Colorado and its immediate surroundings, which includes sites and processes representing all stages of the nuclear cycle, from extraction, milling, and processing to the assembly and deployment of weapons to the storage and monitoring of waste. Through the geographic lens of Colorado, the Atlas seeks to infuse nuclear public policy and public memory discussions with humanistic forms of inquiry that address the materiality of nuclear production and political affairs. For scholarly reviews, click here.
A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado operates in the tradition of the atlases and counter-maps developed by activist scholars and artists. Its heterogeneous collection of texts and artifacts implicitly resists the compartmentalization and black-boxing of military and industrial nuclear discourse. It allows the Atlas’s reader to move forward and backward in time, switch frames of references, and connect seemingly far-flung concepts. Significantly, many individual items appear multiple times in the Atlas, recombined with other materials as the context shifts. Trespassing bounded categories, entries may emerge in more than one path to confront and engage with the ontological uncertainties and temporary unboundedness of the nuclear condition itself. The project is structured to articulate scalar relationships – from the planetary to the corporeal – and to simultaneously present cartographic, textual and image-based information in order to foster active interpretation on the part of its users.
Like printed atlases, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado is a reference work. Designed to be viewed on computer screens, it has a book-like quality allowing for both linear explorations of curated paths, as well as digitally enabled interactions like searchability and map navigation. As the prominent features of the interface, the paths act as narrative arcs that both employ and expand conventional, technopositivist depictions of the nuclear fuel cycle. Popular illustrations of the fuel cycle depict idealized conditions, wherein all waste is fully reprocessable and nuclear activities occur in isolation from socio-political contexts and planetary ecologies. These renderings also foreground nuclear energy as separated from the possibility of weapons. The Atlas’s version of the fuel cycle refuses this ideology of separation and widens the frame to consider the material-geological processes, political processes, and social practices activated by the nuclear. For example, the path entitled “The Earth” — an exploration of the deep time geological processes that formed the Colorado Plateau — is a necessary stage preceding the human-driven processes of “Extraction.” The Atlas also encompasses path contents on “Mobilization” and “Deployment” that are typically absent from the more technically-focused, positivist renderings of the fuel cycle.
Each stage of this expanded cycle is paired with what we call its “shadow side:” the uncontainable material, social, and political implications that together unfold at every stage of the fuel cycle itself. For example, the path “Exposure” is the shadow side of “Refining.” It explores worker and community vulnerability in the face of contamination, the inadequacy of safety and environmental protocols, and corresponding community efforts to take health care-related action. The “shadow” path should not, therefore, be considered the negative or inverse of the positivist path. Rather, it can be understood as the disavowed implications of nuclear technocracy and the improvisational organization of life pursued within and/or in spite of it.
The Atlas aspires to serve as a kind of civic infrastructure rooted in the complex geographies of Colorado. The state is a microcosm of the globally expansive U.S. nuclear complex, encompassing sites of extraction, resource processing, weapons communities involved in distinct dimensions of the atomic. This geographically bounded scope allows us to position local histories and on-the-ground experiences within entangled national and global forces. Narrowing the territorial focus of the nuclear weapons/energy complex to Colorado is, of course, reductive. It is, after all, a people’s atlas, not the people’s atlas. Its title and scope resist the tendency of the nuclear to be considered primarily through the spatial abstractions of international relations, where scales other than the nation-state barely register.
More than a clickable map, the multiple functions of the Atlas are inherently interdisciplinary and call for collaboration among scholars, designers, digital humanists, environmental and community organizations, policymakers, educators, and artists. Questions traditionally bound to specific disciplines are better answered using a broad set of lenses: How can geographical and historical inquiry into the nuclear weapons complex precipitate new insights into the relationships between location, security, harm, intervention, and public action? How can methods developed by geographers, artists, and digital humanists stimulate public memory work that is both more engaging and more nuanced? What forms of interactivity, interface, and representation allow stakeholders and scholars to collaboratively address the past and future of nuclear sites?
The project uses the Scalar publishing platform created by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture based at USC, with a custom interface design by Byse Studio. It is also supported a Provost’s Pilot Research Grant from Georgetown University, and by NuLab: The Center for Maps, Texts, and Networks at Northeastern University.
Download full project description as PDF: PeoplesAtlasProposal.pdf
If your institution would be interested in a pilot stewardship program of “A People’s Atlas,” please consult our partnership materials: Atlas_Partnership.pdf
Credit
Shiloh Krupar and Sarah Kanouse, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado, 2021 launch – ongoing
Reviews
A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado is a beautifully designed public humanities project on the political, geophysical, social, and human aspects of the Cold War nuclear weapons industry in Colorado.
Elli Mylonas, “Review: A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Reviews in Digital Humanities 3.8 (2022), https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/pub/peoples-atlas-of-nuclear-colorado/release/1
This exciting and immersive new work has created a platform across which essays, personal narratives, cartographies and visual media are showcased. Laudably, the publicly accessible website format makes Krupar and Kanouse et al.’s work freely available, not just to other academics but also to community members, activists, artists, veterans, nuclear workers and policy-makers. It offers an important new avenue for public involvement in nuclear knowledge-making.
Becky Alexis-Martin, “The State of a Nuclear State,” cultural geographies 29.2 (2022), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14744740221076518
The large collective of contributors have brought to life an atlas turned upside down, an atlas that looks up from below, from the irradiated ground. And, importantly, it is an atlas that will never be complete. Considered a living digital document by its creators, it will welcome future entries and collaborations with educational partners and organizations to expand and amplify the work it already hosts. This lack of closure mirrors the lack of resolution of nuclear toxicity itself.
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, “Nuclear Knowledge Otherwise: A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Social Text (September 26, 2022), “Nuclear Knowledge Otherwise,” https://socialtextjournal.org/nuclear-knowledge-otherwise-a-peoples-atlas-of-nuclear-colorado/
The contributions compiled in the Atlas, and the way they reverberate against each other—science and art and maps and stories—in a tangled, yet structured way, provides a model for the fraught work of documenting toxicity and the impacts of the nuclear industry on people and places. It is a response to Joseph Masco’s observation of the “near erasure of the nuclear economy from public view, and the banalization of nuclear weapons in everyday American life.”9 In its insistence on highlighting the mundane yet wide-reaching afterlives of the nuclear economy of Colorado, the Atlas counters this erasure.
Charlotte Hecht, ASAP Journal (October 20, 2022), https://asapjournal.com/a-peoples-atlas-of-nuclear-colorado-charlotte-hecht/
. . . provides timely contextualization to contemporary debates around nuclear power and domestic uranium mining that have been reignited by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the potential radioactive tinderbox that has been Russia’s occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. . . . Ukraine might seem very far away from Colorado, but the People’s Atlas provides context to demonstrate that when it comes to nuclear places, dividing lines and borders are porous and overlapping, and particles of wind-borne radiation have no country.
Charlotte Hecht, ASAP Journal (October 20, 2022), https://asapjournal.com/a-peoples-atlas-of-nuclear-colorado-charlotte-hecht/
Given the recent global developments—from nuclear energy’s greenwashing in Europe to atomic threats deployed afresh in the war in Ukraine—it [the atlas] reads eerily, like a harbinger.
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, “Nuclear Knowledge Otherwise: A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Social Text (September 26, 2022), “Nuclear Knowledge Otherwise,” https://socialtextjournal.org/nuclear-knowledge-otherwise-a-peoples-atlas-of-nuclear-colorado/
Society & Space Forum
Review Forum “On Telling Nuclear Stories” with contributions from Shannon Cram, Alexis Bhagat, Toshi Higuchi, Shampa Biswas, Melanie Armstrong, and Hillary Mushkin. How do nuclear materials produce and unsettle narrative itself? This forum reckons with the very nature of nuclear storytelling, examining complex relations of waste and memory, responsibility and repair.
Our Atlas de-emphasizes the traditional overview map in favor of a series of curated, forking “paths” organized around the system of nuclear production itself, from the geophysical processes that give rise to radioactive ores to the management and regulation of nuclear technologies writ large; each phase in the conventional, techno-utopian nuclear fuel cycle is paired with its “shadow,” including its environmental consequences and political contestation.
2023, “Un-mastering the Map, Federating People’s Nuclear Atlases: Response to A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado Forum,” Society and Space, June 30 (co-authored with Sarah Kanouse)
Talks
2023, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Georgetown University and Oxford University, Future of the Humanities Project “Literature, Arts & the Humanities” Series, April 25
2023, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Speaker Series, Penn State University, April 19
2023, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship and the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics and Society, University of Colorado Boulder, March 16
2023, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Nuclear Energy Information Service “Night With The Experts Series,” January 26
2022, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” GEOS Seminar Series, Program in Earth and Environmental Science, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, November 17
2022, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Hanford Challenge “Nuclear Waste Scholar Series,” November 4
2022, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Institute of Contemporary Art Miami “Ecologies of War” seminar organized by Neda Atanasoski (Chair, Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland-College Park), October 25
2021, “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” GU/CULP Global Humanities Public Infrastructures Seminar Series “Spatial Justice as Research Practice: Public Scholarship and the Politics of Mapping Global In/Justice,” Mortara Center for International Studies and the Program in Culture and Politics, Georgetown University, September 21
2021, “A People’s Atlas of Colorado Launch,” NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University, September 14 (with Stephanie Malin, Abbey Hepner, Mallery Quetawki, Jennifer Richter, Gretchen Heefner, Nareg Kuyumjian, Marion Hourdequin, Yuki Miyamoto, and Katherine Chandler)
Podcasts, Interviews, Press
2023, You Are Here: Journal of Creative Geography – link forthcoming
2022, 4S Backchannels, March 21, https://www.4sonline.org/a-peoples-atlas-of-nuclear-colorado/ (Society for Social Studies of Science website)
2021, “Exploring Nuclear Shadows: A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado,” Disrupt international relations podcast, November 30