Guest lecture
Deep Time Reckoning: Infinition & Futurity Among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts
by Dr. Vincent Ialenti (George Washington University/ the University of British Columbia)
April 22, 2021, 18.00-19.00 on Zoom
organised by the Finnish Anthropological Society
Dr. Vincenti Ialenti is an Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He has conducted fieldwork in Finland, resulting to an ethnography Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now (MIT Press, 2020). In the book, he discusses the imaginative strategies, “reckonings”, for envisioning potential far future worlds as done among Finland’s nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. A recent article on him can be found in Helsingin Sanomat.
Find the lecture abstract and full bio below.
The lecture will be followed by a chance to ask questions, discuss and engage with Dr. Ialenti and other event participants.
Zoom event information:
https://tuni.zoom.us/j/63092977254?pwd=b2xvaDBpM2R4U3lnYzBlYThBcGcvUT09
Meeting ID: 630 9297 7254
Passcode: 863965
Deep Time Reckoning: Infinition & Futurity Among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts
Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository “safety case” experts have spent decades forecasting ecological and geophysical events that could, potentially, occur over the coming tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They have developed models of distant future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and human-animal relationships. Drawing upon 32-months of fieldwork in Finland, Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020) approaches the safety case’s hyper-constructions (Gusterson 2008) of far future worlds not solely as fantasy documents (Clarke 1999) devised to manipulate stakeholders into consent. While the safety case was, indeed, made to persuade, its authors saw their farsighted inquiries as flawed-but-pragmatic projections borne out of reflexive self-critique, multi-perspectival visioning practices, and iterative revision cycles. By adopting an outlook of infinition – in which radical complexity was allowed to overflow the thoughts that thought it (Levinas 1969) – they distilled fragmentary sequences of hopes, calculations, fears, datasets, dreams, models, and anxieties about Finland’s socio-ecological futures into mundane artifacts of technocratic paperwork. With these creative labors in view, this talk explores how anthropological engagement with safety case work can widen the temporal horizons through which planetary ecological, epistemic, and socio-political crises are approached.
Bio. Vincent Ialenti is an Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy & Global Affairs. His anthropological research on nuclear waste expert culture has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and The MacArthur Foundation. Vincent has published in Social Studies of Science, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Physics Today, Nuclear Technology, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He has contributed to two Suomen Antropologi forums. Alongside his academic work, Vincent has written for NPR, Forbes, the BBC, Atlas Obscura, Sapiens, and other outlets. He holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University and a MSc in Law, Anthropology & Society from the London School of Economics.
