To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
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After five reactor core meltdowns in the history of the civilian nuclear power industry, calls for reflexivity and humility in re-examining risk management practices are growing from within nuclear energy communities. For its entire history, the nuclear energy field has been male-dominated and also embedded in gendered ideologies of power, technological prowess, and risk-taking. This seminar draws on feminist scholarship and critical studies of science and technology to posit the need for an analysis of the gendered norms and values shaping the institutional cultures of nuclear energy governance. In particular, it calls for an exploration of how risk perceptions and management are influenced by gendered narratives, discourses, and practices in technocratic institutions of nuclear power. This talk will suggest how institutional policy changes could renegotiate practices in nuclear energy governance through principles of feminist scholarship such as social and environmental justice, care, and inclusion of diverse knowledges and epistemologies.
Denia Djokić
Denia Djokić is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Program for Science, Technology and Society, both at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is broadly interested in governance of nuclear energy technology, and her current research explores topics in responsibility and liability in the context of severe nuclear accidents. Her past research has encompassed issues in radioactive waste management and advanced fuel cycle systems analysis.
Prior to her appointment at Harvard, Denia worked as an advisor on issues in policy and governance of science, technology and innovation for the government of Ecuador. She holds an MS and a PhD in Nuclear Engineering with a Designated Emphasis in Energy Science and Technology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a US Department of Energy Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Graduate Student Fellow. She also holds a BS in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University.
