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. The presentation will conclude 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-Technology Studies.

Speaker Biographies
Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer examining the political ecology of landscape and space. Migrating between video, photography, and performative forms, her research-based creative projects shift the visual dimension of the landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge. Her solo and collaborative creative work—most notably with Compass and the National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service—has been presented through the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, Krannert Art Museum, Cooper Union, Smart Museum, and numerous academic and artist-run venues. Her writings on landscape, ecology and contemporary art have appeared in Acme, Leonardo, Parallax, and Art Journal and numerous edited volumes. A 2019-2020 fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, she is Associate Professor of Media Arts in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University. For more on her work, see Sarah Kanouse.

Shiloh Krupar is a geographer and Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University, where she teaches in the Culture and Politics Program in the School of Foreign Service. Her research examines the administration of land and asymmetrical life, geographies of waste and vulnerability, cities, geosurveillance, and neoliberal biomedicine. She is author of Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (2013) and Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers (2023), and co-author of Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making (2019) and Territories of Exaction: Austerity, Bias, Dross (in-progress). She has been published in such venues as Theory, Culture & Society, Society and Space, Public Culture, Radical History Review, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Medical Humanities, cultural geographies, Configurations, Social Semiotics, Liminalities, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, The New Inquiry, SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, and Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies. Krupar also co-directed the National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service and experiments with performance-based geographical analysis. For more on her work, see Shiloh Krupar.

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