![]() | Susanne Bauer Professor, Dr. - TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo |
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03.09.2024-27.09.2024
Knowledge Infrastructures and Data Genealogies in Nuclear Epidemiology
The objective of the stay at Brocher is twofold: First, an existing paper draft will be further developed during the residency and submitted before the end of the stay at Brocher. Second, the time during the residency will also be used to -liaise with staff of the radiation and health section at WHO as well as to scope archival sources on this matter at the WHO archives, including planning potential collaborations for a larger project, especially when it comes to remediation of nuclear legacies.
1) The paper to be submitted is dedicated to an analysis of the knowledge infrastructures of radiation protection. It follows the ways in which local studies come to feed into more global risk assessment purposes. Moving beyond their local context data travel further and are mobilized into policy processes for radiation protection and recommendations. In order to carve out the changing politics that have configured a radiation science, the paper aims to examine the framings, knowledge infrastructures, measurement practices, and repositories of samples and data. It follows a specific post-Soviet case study and its relation to international studies, since the Atomic Bomb Commission Studies in Japan. The paper will show how Cold War infrastructures and models continue to shape epidemiologists’ very devices and routines of knowledge production. With post-Cold War radiation epidemiology as a case study, this paper will contribute to our understanding of risk assessments as a form of knowledge and its methodological core - nuclear epidemiology - and thereby open up and situate contemporary ways of knowing in public health and environmental health matters.
2) Through meetings with WHO staff and a visit to WHO archives, I will scope further materials and conceptualize additional contributions for the larger project on remediation of nuclear legacies in soils. Here I am particularly interested in the WHO archive's holdings on remediation of residual radioactivity from nuclear accidents and fallout and the knowledge base used in decision-making over clean-up of nuclear legacies.