Join us on Friday, June 14th at noon PT to hear Sasha Su-Ling Welland present, In Flight: Embodied Ecologies in America’s Nuclear Heartland. This is a free, virtual presentation.

Register here

Sasha Su-Ling Welland will explore the question: Is there a connection between a sister’s illness and Manhattan Project nuclear waste? St. Louis is home to “the oldest nuclear waste in the country,” as long-time local activist Kay Drey phrases it. Circling around the site of the St. Louis Lambert Airport, this is a story of kinship, grief, and place. It is a story of co-mingled histories of harm that plume outward, across boundaries engineered to separate and contain, and of community activism challenging norms of “security.” To hold together parallel forms of protest means moving beyond individuated grief to recognition of the entangled terrors of racial capitalism and nuclear colonialism that produce everyday carcinogenic relations. To do so is to fall into the world, mapped by material, embodied connections between St. Louis, Hiroshima, Hanford, the Marshall Islands, and beyond. This talk explores telling terrible stories in a way that centers relationality and compels us to seek repair instead of closure.

The Nuclear Waste Scholar Series is funded through a Public Participation Grant from the Washington State Department of Ecology.