A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado

Operating in the tradition of the atlases and counter-maps developed by critical and activist scholars, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado is a collectively authored digital humanities project documenting and interpreting the sites, issues, policies, and cultures associated with the American nuclear weapons complex as it enters its ninth decade. With more than 40 contributors to date, the Atlas collects and cross-references many types of knowledge, affective registers, and forms of evidence: maps, photographs, and descriptions of major and minor nuclear sites; issue briefs offering historical and policy contexts; artworks responding to nuclear legacies; and scholarly essays connecting Colorado’s specific atomic histories to broader issues concerning environmental justice, technoscientific practice, the formation of a nuclear citizenry, and the performance and projection of hegemony. In this presentation, co-editors Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh Krupar discuss their approach to building both the social infrastructures that created and maintain the Atlas and the experimental interface design that resists at the level of form the compartmentalization and black-boxing of military and industrial nuclear discourses.

This is event is sponsored by the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship and the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society. Contact: crdds@colorado.edu