Landscapes, nuclear realities and futures
In 2017, Petra Tjitske Kalshoven began an ethnographic exploration of the landscape hosting Sellafield Ltd (SL), the operator of the government-owned nuclear facilities in the northern English region of West Cumbria.
A subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Sellafield is undergoing a decommissioning process — a significant shift for an area intimately familiar with the nuclear industry.
As Sellafield is dismantled, a combination of technical, environmental, socioeconomic, and political groundwork occurs in this landscape.
Broadening her work to other areas of nuclear decommissioning and nuclear waste management, Petra Tjitske launched a comparative project focused on contested and changing landscapes.
Thanks to a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (UKRI), Mimesis in Action was born - combining an interest in socio-ecological landscape formation, nuclear infrastructures, and future-making dynamics and processes.
How do people imagine their futures in areas of nuclear decommissioning and waste management?
Does it matter to them that they live in spaces associated with the nuclear industry?
To what extent are local hopes and desires in tension with global developments for future making?
And what tensions may arise between human, more-than-human, and ecosystemic interests in these areas?
Research Methods
Ethnographic research
As social anthropologists, we rely on ethnographic methods: rich qualitative, immersive and long-term research practices. Spending prolonged periods of time in the areas we are interested in, we practice participant observation, meet and accompany people in their daily lives, as well as carry out structured and semi-structured interviews in focused reflective spaces. Seeking to gain insights through a fine-grained and culturally sensitive lens, anthropologists hope to shed light on larger, sociopolitical or socio-environmental, contexts.
Experimental workshops
This project combines ethnography (participant-observation, interviews and conversations) with foresight methods. We plan workshops where researchers together with research participants can probe imaginative futures for specific landscapes with fascinating and controversial histories. Each workshop uses slightly different techniques, enabling us to experiment with ways of imagining, thinking, feeling the future — or to reflect on why we are not able to do so.
This is because we want to enliven public debate on nuclear decommissioning and nuclear waste management by foregrounding future unknowns and uncertainties, as paths that open up opportunities rather than lead to paralysis.
This is an ESRC-funded project running from May 2022 to May 2026.
MIMESIS IN ACTION: Nuclear Decomissionning as playground for societal and ecological future-making.CONTACTS:
petratjitske.kalshoven@manchester.ac.uk
sarah.obrien-2@manchester.ac.uk