Conference report:

Atomic Heritage, a 4-day conference on June 15–18, 2021 at Linköping University, Sweden. The conference was organized as part of the Atomic Heritage research project. Project partners: Anna Storm, Florence Fröhlig, Tatiana Kasperski, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė and affiliate Andrei Stsiapanau. 

If nuclear matter is not merely a matter of concern for the technical sciences, but one that requires interdisciplinary forms of heritage expertise, how to handle nuclear matter in ways that keep these heritage processes open to future possibilities for thinking-differently? If nuclear materials are the subject of contested forms of techno-political categorization,1 then what techniques of heritage and memory preservation are best equipped to deal with nuclear waste? In addressing these questions, Atomic Heritage consisted of four organising themes: 1) Bodies, Communities, Heritage; 2) Waste and Radiation; 3) Infrastructural Heritage and Politics; and 4) The Global Atom. An international group of speakers discussed the legacies and geographies of nuclear cultures in sites ranging from Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Japan, certain Pacific Islands, France, the UK, Sweden, the USA, and Germany to name but a few. The conference was wide-reaching in a disciplinary sense, too: the papers presented in Atomic Heritage spanned engagements with nuclear waste storage, nuclear semiotics, artistic and aesthetic practices with nuclear materials, nuclear-contaminated water and food, Soviet history and politics, and the role of slavery and forced labour in nuclear industries. In what follows I will selectively suggest how particular topics gained expression in certain papers across these four days by focussing on: (1) non-human materiality, (2) nuclear colonialism and de-colonialization, (3) speculative thinking and temporalities, and (4) heritage and the archive. I conclude by reflecting on how these themes conference report 19 intervene in the wider critical questions and stakes of social scientific engagements with nuclear heritage processes.