The Trail of the Atom - Image, Witness and Archive

Abstract

Drawing from an archive of images arising from three research projects, this reading will trace a route from a remote mine on the shores of Great Bear Lake, to Japan, Holland and the desert of New Mexico. Its itinerary seeks to chart the constellation of effects - with respect to memory in particular - wrought by atomic and nuclear threats and disaster. Peter C. van Wyck is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Concordia University in Montréal. He is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer with an abiding interest in the theoretical and practical relations between culture, nature, environment, landscape, memory and waste. His most recent book, The Highway of the Atom (McGill-Queens University Press) - winner of the 2011 Gertrude J. Robinson book award from the Canadian Communication Association - is a theoretical and archival investigation tracing the origins of the atomic bomb in Canada's North. In addition to a variety of articles, book chapters, critical reviews and creative texts, he is also author of Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (SUNY Press, 1997).