HSA Science, Technology, and Society Candidate Research Talk, Vincent Ialenti
November 13, 2025 3:30–4:30 p.m.
Location
Shanahan Center, B450
320 E. Foothill Blvd.
Claremont, CA 91711
Contact
Valerie Jusay
vjusay@hmc.edu
909.621.8022
Details
Finalists for the position of assistant professor of science, technology, and society will present a research talk.
Vincent Ialenti, PhD in sociocultural anthropology, Cornell University, will discuss "Nuclear Waste Governance and Long-term Institutional Planning."
How do institutions plan for environmental security futures they will never see? How do bureaucratic artifacts elicit paradoxes that persist beyond their creators, subtly mediating the time horizons of long-term human-ecological security? This talk explores how spectral infrastructures of nuclear waste governance absorb sociopolitical inertias, technocratic rubrics, toxic material aftermaths, budgeting logics, and community-level public feedback to render fragile models of future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. Drawing on fieldwork among Finland’s spent nuclear fuel repository safety assessors, U.S. nuclear weapons waste managers, and billionaire-funded Silicon Valley technoculturists, it tracks how Promethean aesthetics of technocratic optimism and systems resilience are mobilized as implicit reassurances of long-term institutional continuity. Of special interest is how ghost protocols—residual program architectures of past technopolitical compromises—linger in liminal spaces just beyond immediate perception, subtly constraining institutional agency by shaping the boundaries of what can be said, planned, or imagined. Studying them ethnographically reveals how bureaucratic legacy-making collides with the uncertainties of geophysical time, regulatory entropy, and sociopolitical volatility to endow planetary hazard governance with trans-temporal legitimacy. This nexus has provided a compass for the job candidate to implement his anthropological expertise as a U.S. Department of Energy official, as a transdisciplinary STS scholar, and as a public intellectual featured by Scientific American, BBC, Forbes, NPR, and other outlets.
This event is for: faculty, staff, students
Community Connections events provide opportunities for HMC faculty, students and staff to cultivate community, foster open conversations and share important information as together we live out our mission and shape the future of the College.
Calendars
The Cabinet is hosting informal coffee breaks in fall 2025 for students, faculty, and staff. These coffee breaks will be attended by most of the Cabinet team and will provide an opportunity for the community to share ideas, express concerns, and highlight successes.
All are welcome to stop by as schedules allow.
“We don’t want to live in a society in turmoil. In the US, 93 percent of people want to reduce divisiveness, and 86 percent believe it’s possible to disagree in a healthy way. Yet with increasing political and social fragmentation, many of us don’t know how to move past our differences. Civil rights scholar john a. powell presents an actionable path through “bridging” that helps us communicate, coexist, and imagine a new story for our shared future where we all belong.” (taken from Othering and Belonging Institute)
The Office of Civic & Community Engagement (OCCE) will be hosting a guilt-free book club this fall semester on john a. powell’s book The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong. Our first gathering is on Friday, October 3rd.
This learning community is for everyone, from those who are already experienced in community engagement to those who are curious about learning more about this high-impact educational practice. Faculty participants will discuss readings, meet with outside speakers, share ideas, and think collaboratively about implementing community engagement into the 5C students’ experience.
Welcome to HMC’s Community Conversations for the fall 2025.
HMC Community Conversations* use conversation guides with a structured format to help people with different viewpoints and experiences build understanding. There will be 3–5 other people in a table group. It is not a debate, and the goal is not to change one another’s opinions. There are Conversation Agreements like “Listen and Be Curious” and “Show Respect and Suspend Judgement” that create the framework for diving into the questions. The questions are designed to draw out our personal experiences rather than opinions around the topic.
The overall purpose is to learn more about the experiences others have around the topic and build a sense of community.
Community Conversations will take place on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon in Shanahan 1480; and each gathering will be on a separate topic. Gatherings will be in person only.
Kickstart your career journey by joining us each week for the OCS career and professional development series! From expert panels to hands-on workshops and presentations, each session dives into a new topic designed to help you build skills and confidence for your future.
Learn about HMC’s approved study abroad programs and how to study abroad your junior year.
“Enumerative Geometry, Tropical Geometry and Matroids”
Mathematics professor Dagan Karp will attempt to give a friendly introduction to enumerative geometry as revolutionized by ideas from theoretical physics, discover how tropical geometry arises rather naturally in this context and explore how matroids are inexorably involved.
Finalists for the position of assistant professor of science, technology, and society will present a research talk.
Hae-Seo Kim, PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology, UC Irvine, will discuss “Haunting Outer Space: Militarized Space Science, Shamanism, and Cosmological Care in South Korea.”
This talk focuses on a satellite operations center on Jeju Island, South Korea, which was constructed over the remains of a village that had been destroyed during the anti-communist “4.3 massacres” that killed more than 30,000 Jeju islanders between 1948 and 1954. Kim shows how massacre haunts contemporary space science, unsettling narratives of technological progress and national pride. South Korean activists who oppose the siting of the space program in Jeju are staging shamanic rituals to guide and care for the souls buried under the satellite operations center. Through the rituals, the political memory of 4.3 massacres is transformed into a cosmological story—one that invokes the stars, the sun, and the wider universe. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork, Kim analyzes Korean shamanistic understanding of ghosts, outer space, and haunting through the framework of “cosmological care,” showing how these rituals both honor the dead and contest the extension of militarized science into outer space.
Kickstart your career journey by joining us each week for the OCS career and professional development series! From expert panels to hands-on workshops and presentations, each session dives into a new topic designed to help you build skills and confidence for your future.
A lockdown is an emergency protocol designed to secure and protect individuals who are near an immediate threat. This procedure is used when it may be more dangerous to evacuate a building than to remain indoors. At 2:20 p.m., HMC will initiate the exercise with an announcement sent via Mudd Alert, which you will receive through your HMC email (and by text message if you’ve chosen to opt in for text notifications using the Mudd Alert Registration form).
The goal of this exercise is to practice securing yourself in your current location should an emergency situation arise. The exercise will conclude no later than 2:30 p.m. with a second Mudd Alert notification indicating that it has ended. If you do not receive the first or second Mudd Alert messages, please proceed with initiating and concluding the exercise on your own wherever you are on campus during this timeframe. Please note: You are not being asked to evacuate during this lockdown exercise.
Thank you for your time and participation in this important emergency preparedness and safety exercise.
Sign up for Mudd Alert today!
The Harvey Mudd College mass notification system, Mudd Alert, provides rapid emergency notifications to the Harvey Mudd community during crucial emergency situations, such as severe environmental conditions, acts of unexpected violence on campus or other circumstances that call for immediate notification or action.
During an emergency, Mudd Alert messages will contain real-time updates, important information or other instructions. All campus email addresses are connected to the Mudd Alert system. To receive a Mudd Alert message on a cell phone, sign up using the Mudd Alert Registration Form. Although registering your mobile device to receive a text message is optional, it is highly recommended. Every community member is encouraged to add their cell phone to the system and to participate in regular Harvey Mudd emergency preparedness exercises.
Finalists for the position of assistant professor of science, technology, and society will present a research talk.
Vincent Ialenti, PhD in sociocultural anthropology, Cornell University, will discuss “Nuclear Waste Governance and Long-term Institutional Planning.”
How do institutions plan for environmental security futures they will never see? How do bureaucratic artifacts elicit paradoxes that persist beyond their creators, subtly mediating the time horizons of long-term human-ecological security? This talk explores how spectral infrastructures of nuclear waste governance absorb sociopolitical inertias, technocratic rubrics, toxic material aftermaths, budgeting logics, and community-level public feedback to render fragile models of future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. Drawing on fieldwork among Finland’s spent nuclear fuel repository safety assessors, U.S. nuclear weapons waste managers, and billionaire-funded Silicon Valley technoculturists, it tracks how Promethean aesthetics of technocratic optimism and systems resilience are mobilized as implicit reassurances of long-term institutional continuity. Of special interest is how ghost protocols—residual program architectures of past technopolitical compromises—linger in liminal spaces just beyond immediate perception, subtly constraining institutional agency by shaping the boundaries of what can be said, planned, or imagined. Studying them ethnographically reveals how bureaucratic legacy-making collides with the uncertainties of geophysical time, regulatory entropy, and sociopolitical volatility to endow planetary hazard governance with trans-temporal legitimacy. This nexus has provided a compass for the job candidate to implement his anthropological expertise as a U.S. Department of Energy official, as a transdisciplinary STS scholar, and as a public intellectual featured by Scientific American, BBC, Forbes, NPR, and other outlets.
“We don’t want to live in a society in turmoil. In the US, 93 percent of people want to reduce divisiveness, and 86 percent believe it’s possible to disagree in a healthy way. Yet with increasing political and social fragmentation, many of us don’t know how to move past our differences. Civil rights scholar john a. powell presents an actionable path through “bridging” that helps us communicate, coexist, and imagine a new story for our shared future where we all belong.” (taken from Othering and Belonging Institute)
The Office of Civic & Community Engagement (OCCE) will be hosting a guilt-free book club this fall semester on john a. powell’s book The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong. Our first gathering is on Friday, October 3rd.
This learning community is for everyone, from those who are already experienced in community engagement to those who are curious about learning more about this high-impact educational practice. Faculty participants will discuss readings, meet with outside speakers, share ideas, and think collaboratively about implementing community engagement into the 5C students’ experience.
The Cabinet is hosting informal coffee breaks in fall 2025 for students, faculty and staff. These coffee breaks will be attended by most of the Cabinet team and will provide an opportunity for the community to share ideas, express concerns and highlight successes.
All are welcome to stop by as schedules allow.
Welcome to HMC’s Community Conversations for the fall 2025.
HMC Community Conversations* use conversation guides with a structured format to help people with different viewpoints and experiences build understanding. There will be 3–5 other people in a table group. It is not a debate, and the goal is not to change one another’s opinions. There are Conversation Agreements like “Listen and Be Curious” and “Show Respect and Suspend Judgement” that create the framework for diving into the questions. The questions are designed to draw out our personal experiences rather than opinions around the topic.
The overall purpose is to learn more about the experiences others have around the topic and build a sense of community.
Community Conversations will take place on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon in Shanahan 1480; and each gathering will be on a separate topic. Gatherings will be in person only.
Kickstart your career journey by joining us each week for the OCS career and professional development series! From expert panels to hands-on workshops and presentations, each session dives into a new topic designed to help you build skills and confidence for your future.
“We don’t want to live in a society in turmoil. In the US, 93 percent of people want to reduce divisiveness, and 86 percent believe it’s possible to disagree in a healthy way. Yet with increasing political and social fragmentation, many of us don’t know how to move past our differences. Civil rights scholar john a. powell presents an actionable path through “bridging” that helps us communicate, coexist, and imagine a new story for our shared future where we all belong.” (taken from Othering and Belonging Institute)
The Office of Civic & Community Engagement (OCCE) will be hosting a guilt-free book club this fall semester on john a. powell’s book The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong. Our first gathering is on Friday, October 3rd.
This learning community is for everyone, from those who are already experienced in community engagement to those who are curious about learning more about this high-impact educational practice. Faculty participants will discuss readings, meet with outside speakers, share ideas, and think collaboratively about implementing community engagement into the 5C students’ experience.
Welcome to HMC’s Community Conversations for the fall 2025.
HMC Community Conversations* use conversation guides with a structured format to help people with different viewpoints and experiences build understanding. There will be 3–5 other people in a table group. It is not a debate, and the goal is not to change one another’s opinions. There are Conversation Agreements like “Listen and Be Curious” and “Show Respect and Suspend Judgement” that create the framework for diving into the questions. The questions are designed to draw out our personal experiences rather than opinions around the topic.
The overall purpose is to learn more about the experiences others have around the topic and build a sense of community.
Community Conversations will take place on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon in Shanahan 1480; and each gathering will be on a separate topic. Gatherings will be in person only.
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