NUCLEARWATERS seminar with Lis Kayser

NUCLEARWATERS arranges the third in its series of zoominars. You are all most welcome to attend. Our invited speaker Lis Kayser from the University of Aarhus and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) will tell us about her ongoing PhD project about the nuclear afterlife in French Polynesia.

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Lis Kayser holds a MA in Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes from the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She is currently enrolled as a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). Her PhD-project is a detailed ethnographic study of the nuclear afterlife in French Polynesia. Lis explores how nuclear legacies, including infrastructural expansion, economic transformation, ruination, and competing nuclear imaginaries, reverberate in the present on the Hao atoll, which was the military-logistical base for the French nuclear testing program in the Pacific. In her NUCLEARWATERS seminar presentation, Lis will examine how these nuclear legacies affect everyday life on Hao and how complex local memories of the nuclear military past inform future island development projects, including the construction of a 300-million-dollar Chinese fish farm in Hao’s lagoon. Lis’ PhD project is part of the research program on ‘Radioactive Ruins: Security in the Age of the Anthropocene’ (RADIANT), which empirically studies the Anthropocene as the radioactive afterlife of the Cold War in the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, and French Polynesia.