Papers by Misria Shaik Ali
Science, Technology and Human Values, 2025
Containment is not just a problem of expertise and boundary work (Kinsella 2001). The problem can... more Containment is not just a problem of expertise and boundary work (Kinsella 2001). The problem cannot be addressed simply by including people who demonstrate their claim to expertise in regulatory processes of ensuring nuclear safety. The problem with irradiation is embedded in the ways regulatory epistemologies are used to obscure and neglect contamination.
In this essay, I focus on elements that forge the above worlds into porous relations. I demonstrate that UCIL lost the trust of the villagers through constant assertions of the safety design of the TP even as villagers claimed that it failed to protect them from irradiation leading to a sharp dualism between safety and protection in the extant regulatory practice. I show that it is the material discourse of nuclear safety (and not the lack of nuclear safety) that leads to distrust in nuclear energy. “Nuclear safety” regulations do not always lead to the protection of health and the environment and this essay critiques the scholarly trend that imagines mistrust in nuclear energy as emergent from mere political positions (anti-/pro-nuclear) or that it can be repaired by making safer, community-centered technologies.[vii] I brew a disinterest for nuclear-safety-oriented scholarship and enliven the interest for the experiments on radioporosity reminding that the established boundary between nuclear containment and the world is always-already porous.
Seminar, 2020
This paper discusses the images of Indian Muslim that was invoked during India's March 2020 covid... more This paper discusses the images of Indian Muslim that was invoked during India's March 2020 covid experience and its effects othering and marginalisation of the community
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
Seminar, 2019
Nuclear energy policy making in India is a highly contested policy arena which involves players w... more Nuclear energy policy making in India is a highly contested policy arena which involves players with diverse interests in the policy matter. There are those who constantly emphasize on the need for nuclear energy for the sake of national progress and there are those who oppose nuclear energy vehemently. Mostly the local people living around the nuclear project constitute the opposition category. Nuclear energy conveyed by the state actors ‘as a matter of national interest’ has led to the ‘citizens’ of the Indian state taking active participation in performing the policy in the public arena. This paper will attempt to identify the people who are performing in the Indian nuclear policy arena and how their interests are constructed by the other players in the arena using the case of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP). By identifying the diversity of interests in the Indian nuclear policy arena, the paper will trace the discursive formation of safety and fear, the two notions which sustain and are sustained by the support for and opposition against nuclear energy in India. The paper will shed light on how the policy elites, namely the state actors and nuclear institutions, in ‘solving’ the nuclear fear co-construct the discourse of safety and discourse of fear as two worlds that never meet, like the groups opposing and supporting it. Finally, this paper will show that the nature in which concerns of the local people about nuclear energy is conceived by the policy elites in order to find solutions for the problem, is where the problem lies.
Around the end of November 2015, from university lectures to tea shops, one could find pockets of... more Around the end of November 2015, from university lectures to tea shops, one could find pockets of people discussing about 'saving the mother earth' from further degradation. People became mediators of gossip, which ousted the facts of newspapers.
Book Reviews by Misria Shaik Ali
Thesis Chapters by Misria Shaik Ali
Proquest, 2022
Read the entire dissertation at: https://shorturl.ac/becomingirradiated
Becoming Irradiated de... more Read the entire dissertation at: https://shorturl.ac/becomingirradiated
Becoming Irradiated demonstrates that the dual epistemic conditions of self-reliance and nuclear safety neglect experiences of radioactive contamination across three varied irradiated facilities in India that comprise the nuclear fuel cycle under study. The Nuclear fuel cycle, as the study’s technoscientific apparatus, puts things, facilities, distinct entities, bodies and illnesses that are out of relations, back into relations and, capture the self-reliance conditions that shape India as nuclear country. The facilities include Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill and the Mayapuri Scrap Metal Market modelled on developmentalist, technological and neo-liberal self-reliance. The dissertation provides a map of self-reliance, exploring its multiplicity, to demonstrate the psychopathology of colonialism embedded in India’s conceptual practice of self-reliance. Through a discourse analysis of IAEA regulatory episteme, the dissertation’s regulatory intervention questions the epistemic premise of today’s international nuclear regulation—nuclear safety achieved in the facility’s technologies, operations and management protects health and environment from irradiation. It analyzes the ontological enactment of the nuclear safety episteme in the facilities, and critiques it through embodied, subjugated epistemologies of becoming irradiated around it based on situational, para-sited, sensory and multispecies ethnographic analysis.
The dissertation is theoretically framed by Cognitive Justice which provides a space for thought experiments on how different knowledge systems from Global North and Global South come to coexist in tense and dialogical relations. Under Cognitive Justice creating knowledge is not a task marked off to technoscientific expertise and hence, in this dissertation, I treat experts and epistemically oppressed peoples who experience irradiation as “epistemic bodies” whose epistemic process is embedded in ways they relate with varied technologies. By putting the embodied knowledges of irradiation and the epistemology of nuclear safety that shapes regulation in the facilities in conversation, this dissertation demonstrates how nuclear safety with its material arrangements emerge as an epistemology of neglect, making neglect less of a moral/behavioral matter and more of knowledge issue in Agnotology. The embodied knowledges of radiation illnesses, the dissertation demonstrates, are made and legitimated by victims of irradiation through accounts shared in popular media and in village meetings, forging radioactive kinships—relations that are forged due to ionizing effects of irradiation. Through epistemic bodies, nuclear neglect, radioactive kinship and nuclear differentiation, this dissertation lays the grounds for Critical Nuclear Studies (CNS). The attention to the production and sharing of subjugated knowledges and as they challenge the official discourses of the nuclear order are components of the field of Critical Nuclear Studies.
This dissertation pushes forward the frame of cosmopolitical and relational thinking by critiquing the move away from epistemology to ontology in STS and pivots STS, Study of Expertise, Cognitive Justice, Southern theory and Critical Nuclear Studies along the relational turn. The analyzes puts forth a demand for a regulatory apparatus namely Embodied Radiation Protection regime that attends to the epistemic agency of local people living around the facilities in knowing radioactive contamination. The embodied radiation protection regime relies on Ariviyal as pluralized embodied/specialized knowledge, alter-tracers as sensory apparatus, and is founded on the porous relations established with radioactivity on neglected epistemological grounds of nuclear operations and becoming irradiated. This dissertation frames sites of evasion as places where responsibility unevenly gets distributed onto the victims under an embodied radiation protection regime if the state is not held accountable in an increasingly capital centered regulatory apparatus.
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Papers by Misria Shaik Ali
In this essay, I focus on elements that forge the above worlds into porous relations. I demonstrate that UCIL lost the trust of the villagers through constant assertions of the safety design of the TP even as villagers claimed that it failed to protect them from irradiation leading to a sharp dualism between safety and protection in the extant regulatory practice. I show that it is the material discourse of nuclear safety (and not the lack of nuclear safety) that leads to distrust in nuclear energy. “Nuclear safety” regulations do not always lead to the protection of health and the environment and this essay critiques the scholarly trend that imagines mistrust in nuclear energy as emergent from mere political positions (anti-/pro-nuclear) or that it can be repaired by making safer, community-centered technologies.[vii] I brew a disinterest for nuclear-safety-oriented scholarship and enliven the interest for the experiments on radioporosity reminding that the established boundary between nuclear containment and the world is always-already porous.
Book Reviews by Misria Shaik Ali
Thesis Chapters by Misria Shaik Ali
Becoming Irradiated demonstrates that the dual epistemic conditions of self-reliance and nuclear safety neglect experiences of radioactive contamination across three varied irradiated facilities in India that comprise the nuclear fuel cycle under study. The Nuclear fuel cycle, as the study’s technoscientific apparatus, puts things, facilities, distinct entities, bodies and illnesses that are out of relations, back into relations and, capture the self-reliance conditions that shape India as nuclear country. The facilities include Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill and the Mayapuri Scrap Metal Market modelled on developmentalist, technological and neo-liberal self-reliance. The dissertation provides a map of self-reliance, exploring its multiplicity, to demonstrate the psychopathology of colonialism embedded in India’s conceptual practice of self-reliance. Through a discourse analysis of IAEA regulatory episteme, the dissertation’s regulatory intervention questions the epistemic premise of today’s international nuclear regulation—nuclear safety achieved in the facility’s technologies, operations and management protects health and environment from irradiation. It analyzes the ontological enactment of the nuclear safety episteme in the facilities, and critiques it through embodied, subjugated epistemologies of becoming irradiated around it based on situational, para-sited, sensory and multispecies ethnographic analysis.
The dissertation is theoretically framed by Cognitive Justice which provides a space for thought experiments on how different knowledge systems from Global North and Global South come to coexist in tense and dialogical relations. Under Cognitive Justice creating knowledge is not a task marked off to technoscientific expertise and hence, in this dissertation, I treat experts and epistemically oppressed peoples who experience irradiation as “epistemic bodies” whose epistemic process is embedded in ways they relate with varied technologies. By putting the embodied knowledges of irradiation and the epistemology of nuclear safety that shapes regulation in the facilities in conversation, this dissertation demonstrates how nuclear safety with its material arrangements emerge as an epistemology of neglect, making neglect less of a moral/behavioral matter and more of knowledge issue in Agnotology. The embodied knowledges of radiation illnesses, the dissertation demonstrates, are made and legitimated by victims of irradiation through accounts shared in popular media and in village meetings, forging radioactive kinships—relations that are forged due to ionizing effects of irradiation. Through epistemic bodies, nuclear neglect, radioactive kinship and nuclear differentiation, this dissertation lays the grounds for Critical Nuclear Studies (CNS). The attention to the production and sharing of subjugated knowledges and as they challenge the official discourses of the nuclear order are components of the field of Critical Nuclear Studies.
This dissertation pushes forward the frame of cosmopolitical and relational thinking by critiquing the move away from epistemology to ontology in STS and pivots STS, Study of Expertise, Cognitive Justice, Southern theory and Critical Nuclear Studies along the relational turn. The analyzes puts forth a demand for a regulatory apparatus namely Embodied Radiation Protection regime that attends to the epistemic agency of local people living around the facilities in knowing radioactive contamination. The embodied radiation protection regime relies on Ariviyal as pluralized embodied/specialized knowledge, alter-tracers as sensory apparatus, and is founded on the porous relations established with radioactivity on neglected epistemological grounds of nuclear operations and becoming irradiated. This dissertation frames sites of evasion as places where responsibility unevenly gets distributed onto the victims under an embodied radiation protection regime if the state is not held accountable in an increasingly capital centered regulatory apparatus.
In this essay, I focus on elements that forge the above worlds into porous relations. I demonstrate that UCIL lost the trust of the villagers through constant assertions of the safety design of the TP even as villagers claimed that it failed to protect them from irradiation leading to a sharp dualism between safety and protection in the extant regulatory practice. I show that it is the material discourse of nuclear safety (and not the lack of nuclear safety) that leads to distrust in nuclear energy. “Nuclear safety” regulations do not always lead to the protection of health and the environment and this essay critiques the scholarly trend that imagines mistrust in nuclear energy as emergent from mere political positions (anti-/pro-nuclear) or that it can be repaired by making safer, community-centered technologies.[vii] I brew a disinterest for nuclear-safety-oriented scholarship and enliven the interest for the experiments on radioporosity reminding that the established boundary between nuclear containment and the world is always-already porous.
Becoming Irradiated demonstrates that the dual epistemic conditions of self-reliance and nuclear safety neglect experiences of radioactive contamination across three varied irradiated facilities in India that comprise the nuclear fuel cycle under study. The Nuclear fuel cycle, as the study’s technoscientific apparatus, puts things, facilities, distinct entities, bodies and illnesses that are out of relations, back into relations and, capture the self-reliance conditions that shape India as nuclear country. The facilities include Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill and the Mayapuri Scrap Metal Market modelled on developmentalist, technological and neo-liberal self-reliance. The dissertation provides a map of self-reliance, exploring its multiplicity, to demonstrate the psychopathology of colonialism embedded in India’s conceptual practice of self-reliance. Through a discourse analysis of IAEA regulatory episteme, the dissertation’s regulatory intervention questions the epistemic premise of today’s international nuclear regulation—nuclear safety achieved in the facility’s technologies, operations and management protects health and environment from irradiation. It analyzes the ontological enactment of the nuclear safety episteme in the facilities, and critiques it through embodied, subjugated epistemologies of becoming irradiated around it based on situational, para-sited, sensory and multispecies ethnographic analysis.
The dissertation is theoretically framed by Cognitive Justice which provides a space for thought experiments on how different knowledge systems from Global North and Global South come to coexist in tense and dialogical relations. Under Cognitive Justice creating knowledge is not a task marked off to technoscientific expertise and hence, in this dissertation, I treat experts and epistemically oppressed peoples who experience irradiation as “epistemic bodies” whose epistemic process is embedded in ways they relate with varied technologies. By putting the embodied knowledges of irradiation and the epistemology of nuclear safety that shapes regulation in the facilities in conversation, this dissertation demonstrates how nuclear safety with its material arrangements emerge as an epistemology of neglect, making neglect less of a moral/behavioral matter and more of knowledge issue in Agnotology. The embodied knowledges of radiation illnesses, the dissertation demonstrates, are made and legitimated by victims of irradiation through accounts shared in popular media and in village meetings, forging radioactive kinships—relations that are forged due to ionizing effects of irradiation. Through epistemic bodies, nuclear neglect, radioactive kinship and nuclear differentiation, this dissertation lays the grounds for Critical Nuclear Studies (CNS). The attention to the production and sharing of subjugated knowledges and as they challenge the official discourses of the nuclear order are components of the field of Critical Nuclear Studies.
This dissertation pushes forward the frame of cosmopolitical and relational thinking by critiquing the move away from epistemology to ontology in STS and pivots STS, Study of Expertise, Cognitive Justice, Southern theory and Critical Nuclear Studies along the relational turn. The analyzes puts forth a demand for a regulatory apparatus namely Embodied Radiation Protection regime that attends to the epistemic agency of local people living around the facilities in knowing radioactive contamination. The embodied radiation protection regime relies on Ariviyal as pluralized embodied/specialized knowledge, alter-tracers as sensory apparatus, and is founded on the porous relations established with radioactivity on neglected epistemological grounds of nuclear operations and becoming irradiated. This dissertation frames sites of evasion as places where responsibility unevenly gets distributed onto the victims under an embodied radiation protection regime if the state is not held accountable in an increasingly capital centered regulatory apparatus.