Speaker
Description
Storytelling can be a powerful tool for change and social activism. This essay proposes a storytelling blog as a platform to raise awareness and engagement with the goals of the CTBTO, namely, bringing the CTBT into force and working toward global deproliferation of nuclear weapons. Embracing Shampa Biswas’s broader conception of nuclear harms, such a project could work to make the harms of nuclear testing and other nuclear activities, such as uranium mining, intelligible and moving for a broad audience. This would align with Rob Nixon’s imperative to make slow violence – “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” – visible and arresting. Such a project could also make connections with the geographical concept of sacrifice zones, areas where environmental damage and economic disinvestment devalue life and wellbeing. Finally, a blog of this kind could make links to global environmental justice movements, which often focus on the location of sacrifice zones in marginalized, racialized communities; this project could therefore serve to connect the goals of the CTBTO to broader environmental movements and mobilize activists, organizers, and concerned citizens to pressure governments to bring the treaty into force.
Promotional text
This project would serve as an outreach initiative to engage the public with the goals of the CTBTO, and thus falls under Topic 5.3 of the SnT themes. As an undergraduate student, I also believe this project would appeal to youth and connect the CTBTO to less engaged audiences.
