Conflictual Collaboration: 

The concept of “conflictual collaboration” expresses how issues of resistance and collaboration are not always necessarily opposed; they can also happen at the same time. In particular, it describes how initial practices of resistance by non-state actors can evolve in collaboration with official politics of state governance. Using the case studies of citizen science in Fukushima, where “lay people” track and monitor radiation by themselves, I argue that civic resources used to resist and reinterpret official narratives of contamination end up reinforcing a state-sponsored normalization of the disaster. Meanwhile, they become crucial techniques of neoliberal governance designed to govern the conduct of populations amid contaminated environments. While useful, the growing impact of citizen science also echoes a neoliberal shift in the management of contamination, leading to reduced public expenditure, minimal government intervention, and risk privatization – meaning that risk becomes a matter of personal business rather than the state’s responsibility. In such a context, the empowerment provided by monitoring capacities shifts state responsibility for ensuring radiological protection onto the shoulders of some nuclear victims. The danger, I argue, lies in a normalization of risk that produce societies in which citizens have to take care of themselves in increasingly polluted environments, while equally interpreting partial and complex data about controversial environmental dangers. My research challenges the celebration of citizen science as a de facto democratic endeavor and theorizes the neoliberal implications of its pursuit, as civil actors become an integral part in the state management of radiation risks. This contrast the current literature on citizen science, which was theorized as spaces of contestation that fall outside the formal scope of politics or as ideological loci of resistance in a context that limits political radicalism.

From: Polleri, Maxime. 2019. Conflictual Collaboration: Citizen Science and the Governance of Radioactive Contamination after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. American Ethnologist. 46(2): 214-226.

See also: Polleri, Maxime. 2021. Q&A: Conflictual Collaboration: Citizen Science and the Governance of Radioactive Contamination after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. American Philosophical Society. May 11.

Post-political Uncertainties: 

The concept of “post-political uncertainties” describes how specific categories of uncertainty can be produced and mobilized to foreclose in-depth political deliberations around controversial issues. Drawing from a set of public controversies surrounding the role of nuclear power and the threat of radioactive contamination in post-Fukushima Japan, I examine how categories of uncertainty around specific political scenes, like energy security or global warming, gain supremacy over the uncertainties of radiation hazards – invariably foreclosing the expression of concern by members of the public. For some state actors, the potential uncertainties linked with the abandonment of nuclear power have the power to trigger political turmoil of a higher scale than those linked with Fukushima’s radioactive contamination. A form of double depoliticization takes place, in which the issue of Fukushima’s radioactive contamination gets depoliticized through perceived priorities that are paradoxically depicted as post-political, that is, in an urgent need for immediate action and not open to in-depth deliberation. Post-political uncertainties act as effective tools to manage the controversies surrounding energy and toxic waste. The concept highlights how controversies surrounding Fukushima’s radioactive contamination fail to become the subject of public interrogation and political disputes within certain governmental spheres. This kind of depoliticization raises ethical questions surrounding meaningful public participation in decisions that happen at the intersection of politics and science and technology studies.

From: Polleri, Maxime. 2019. Post-political Uncertainties: Governing Nuclear Controversies in Post-Fukushima Japan. Social Studies of Science. 50(4): 567-588.

Radioactive Performance:

Drawing on theories of performativity, the concept of “radioactive performance” theorizes how environmental hazards get materialize to support specific politics of recovery in post-disaster contexts. Through an ethnography of state-sponsored exhibits, hands on activity, and didactic centers aimed at providing risk information after Fukushima, I examine how state expertise on radiation hazards is increasingly being disseminated to the public via teaching infrastructure that are jargon-free, interactive, and amusing. Through such forms of risk communication radiation is presented as non-threatening and even beneficial. What is the impetus for resorting to these forms of explanations after a nuclear disaster? I argue that educational infrastructures do not simply provide basic information about radiation, but also attempt to socialize the victims of a nuclear disaster into learning to live comfortably with the residual radioactivity of Fukushima. While easier to understand than previous forms of communication, radioactive performances promote asymmetrical information about environmental risks, being partisan toward a state-laden politics of revitalization that aims to manage the vulnerabilities of an ecologically and economically insecure Japan. Radioactive performances are performative processes that transform the story of a nuclear disaster from an unstable situation of emergency and anxiety to a narrative of prompt recovery, resilience, and normalization. The concept provides sociocultural insights within historically established processes of control that aim to defuse scientific controversies, to reclaim political control and economic stability, and to pacify fearful publics.

From: Polleri, Maxime. 2021. Radioactive Performance: Teaching about Radiation after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. Anthropological Quarterly. 94(1): 93-123.

Post-victimization:

The notion of post-victimization refers to scholarships that attempt to move beyond tropes of victimization, refusing to further creates representations of victimhood in their work. This scholarship contrasts former academic tendencies to contrast the struggles of victims against the viewpoints of state discourses, corporate polluters, and oppressors. While post-victimization humanizes individual responses, there are important pitfalls associated with this turn, such as a tendency to fall back on cultural relativism and a cooption of this work by actors with their own vested interests. First, by setting up non-victimization as narratives that need to be respected from the native point of view, post-victimization fails to critically examine how external factors affect one’s agency and discourses about victimhood. What affected individuals say and do is not the mere result of free will, but also processes molded by displays of power. A non-judgmental approach in post-victimization remains uncritical to producing accounts that illuminates the forms of structural harms that bring hardships in the first place or that hinder a politics of victimization to ever take place because of cultural, economic and political factors. Second, the post-victimization turn is already encouraged by states, corporate lobbies, and regulatory agencies that do not want a politics of victimization to ever happen after certain incidents. The post-victimization approach turns a blind eye to whom or what gets empowered by narratives of non-victimization.

From: Polleri, Maxime. 2022. Ethnographies of Nuclear Life: From Victimhood to Post-Victimization. Platypus: The CASTAC Blog. 1 March.

Misinformation as Signals:

The notion of “misinformation as signals” refers to the process of examining misleading materials as signals that reveal a range of narratives and experiences within specific issues. Rather than treating misinformation as dichotomic pieces of information that are “true” or “false,” the concept of misinformation as signals provides alternative ways to study the phenomenon of incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation as signal focuses on: (1) analyzing misinformation within its context of production, rather than as isolated pieces of information; (2) analyzing misinformation as a signal of trust towards the Other; and (3) analyzing the unique characteristics of the network that allow misinformation to proliferate in social spheres. By theorizing misinformation as signals embodying specific cultural information, this notion encourages further education on the many forms that misinformation takes in the 21st century. 

From: Polleri, Maxime. 2022. Toward an Anthropology of Misinformation. Anthropology Today. 38(5): 17-20.