Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
3
result(s) for
"Hecht, Gabrielle, author"
Sort by:
Being nuclear : Africans and the global uranium trade
Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear - a state that she calls 'nuclearity' - lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between 'developing nations' and 'nuclear powers'. Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one.
Book
Being Nuclear
Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had \"sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa\" (later specified as the infamous \"yellowcake from Niger\"). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be \"nuclear.\" Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear--a state that she calls \"nuclearity\"--lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between \"developing nations\" (often former colonies) and \"nuclear powers\" (often former colonizers). Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one.Hecht follows uranium's path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market. She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
eBook
The Radiance of France
How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else.
In the aftermath of World War II, as France sought a distinctive role for itself in the modern, postcolonial world, the nation and its leaders enthusiastically embraced large technological projects in general and nuclear power in particular. The Radiance of France asks how it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else.
To answer this question, Gabrielle Hecht has forged an innovative combination of technology studies and cultural and political history in a book that, as Michel Callon writes in the new foreword to this edition, “not only sheds new light on the role of technology in the construction of national identities” but is also “a seminal contribution to the history of contemporary France.” Proposing the concept of technopolitical regime as a way to analyze the social, political, cultural, and technological dynamics among engineering elites, unionized workers, and rural communities, Hecht shows how the history of France's first generation of nuclear reactors is also a history of the multiple meanings of nationalism, from the postwar period (and France's desire for post-Vichy redemption) to 1969 and the adoption of a “Frenchified” American design.
This paperback edition of Hecht's groundbreaking book includes both Callon's foreword and an afterword by the author in which she brings the story up to date, and reflects on such recent developments as the 2007 French presidential election, the promotion of nuclear power as the solution to climate change, and France's aggressive exporting of nuclear technology.
eBook