Nuclear Gaia: Media Archives of Planetary Harm

Describes the transformations we have witnessed due to the development of nuclear science and technology, accelerating policies interdependent on energy, and military procedures that have led us to make a provocative claim that, in many respects, planet Earth is getting closer to the embodiment of the project we call Nuclear Gaia.The book examines media archives and online platforms that recover data and memory and shape community knowledge of nuclear events from the distant and nearer past. These are the pieces of evidence that we are on the eve of creating new forms of social justice, carried out by open-source investigations (OSINT) groups, independent researchers, artists, media makers, activists, local communities and civic groups. Thus, analysing nuclear processes and their social and environmental consequences is no longer the exclusive domain of experts, scientists, politicians and the military. The authors hope that such communities’ practices and decolonial discourses, combined with the critiques within our methodology as post-nuclear media studies, can also change the fate of nuclear industry victims by creating media space to discuss and regain justice as socially sanctioned and shared rules for understanding and using nuclear energy both in past and the future.

About the Author

Agnieszka Jelewska, Ph.D., is a professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and director of the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center AMU. She examines the transdisciplinary relations between science, art, culture, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries, their social and political dimension. She is also a curator and co-creator of art and science projects.

Michał Krawczak, PhD, assistant professor at the Anthropology and Cultural Studies Department of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, co-founder and program director of the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center. Researcher, designer and curator of art and science projects. His main research field is modern forms of violence from the perspective of media and cultural studies.