The bomb, not water, this week


I've been distracted this week, and probably in the next as well, by having to produce a piece for a journal, Transformations, dealing with a course I'll teach when I go back next year to regular duties. The theme of my "Political Ecology of the Southwest" course will be "Atomic Borderlands" in the fall of 2010 and I'm writing a theoretical-pedagogical piece on how to teach the (end of the) Earth without depressing everyone including myself. So apart from a discussion with Frances Levine (Director, Palace of the Governors) regarding her 1990 piece in NMHR on the effects of adjudication in the state, this week is about the creation of destruction. Friday, a lecture on the development of the atomic bomb in Albuquerque, and an early Saturday morning departure from the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History to go to the actual Trinity testing site in southern New Mexico. They organize a tour every year, including a "live explosion" on the White Sands Missile Site, so I should finally be able to understand Masco's (2006) complex concept of the "technoaesthetics of the bomb" even if it will be puny by comparison. More later...

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