Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan with Maxime Polleri (NYU Press, 2026)
The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.
Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan (NYU Press, 2026) offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives…
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