Students blog and discuss responses to weekly prompts during the course.
Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason are currently co-teaching a graduate seminar, “Nuclear Futures: Theorizing the Environmental Humanities for the Post-Fukushima Age.”
This seminar interrogates the concept of futurity in the context of environmental activism and artistic engagement with atomic issues from 1945 to the present. Focusing on the specific contours of protest cultures and aesthetic production around nuclear disaster in Germany and Japan specifically, the course compares the unique perspectives of two national cultures with long traditions of nuclear abolition movements, shaped by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the legacies of World War II and the first Cold War, and the devastation wrought by nuclear accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Beginning with Japan and Germany’s unique postwar nuclear histories—with their striking convergent and divergent aspects—the course proceeds to address the urgent question of nuclear futures today, in an era characterized by environmental degradation, economic and social precarity, and a “New Cold War.” A key component of the course is its theoretical engagement with the environmental humanities, including readings on the Anthropocene, precarity, and neoliberal capitalism.