Operating in the tradition of the atlases developed by activist scholars, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado is a collectively authored digital 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 forms of evidence such as maps, photographs, descriptions of nuclear sites, and briefs offering historical and political contexts. In this presentation, co-editors Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh Krupar discussed their approach to building both the social infrastructures that created and maintain the atlas, as well as the experimental interface design that resists the compartmentalization of military and industrial nuclear discourses. The presentation concluded with an invitation to use the atlas as a publication forum for student research in a wide range of disciplines, from art history to science and technology.
Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple, a Future of the Humanities Project senior fellow, moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master's Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.