HSA Science, Technology, and Society Candidate Research Talk, Vincent Ialenti
November 13, 2025 3:30–4:30 p.m.
Add to CalendarLocation
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
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