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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on collaboration between an anthropologist, a foresight consultant, and an ecologist, I explore the potential of interdisciplinary practice in a project that seeks both to theorize and to contribute to ecological and societal futuring in areas of nuclear decommissioning and waste management.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on close collaboration in a research team including an anthropologist, a foresight consultant, and an ecologist, I am interested in the potential of interdisciplinary practice to achieve both intellectual and practical outcomes whilst operating in a speculative, future-orientated mode. The collaboration I focus on is key to my multi-sited four-year ESRC-funded inquiry into ecological and societal future making in areas of nuclear decommissioning and waste management, one of which is West Cumbria, the region around the Sellafield nuclear facilities. Such areas lend themselves to ‘futuring’, and to exploring local experiences and conceptions of time more generally, as residents grapple with the material, socioeconomic, affective, and ecological traces of (post-)industrialism, and consider the presence of radioactive materials that decay only over thousands of years. What scenarios for what types of (working, living) future landscapes might be envisaged for such areas? In which, and whose, conceptions of the good life would these scenarios be grounded, and to what extent might this ‘good life’ be extended to more-than-human actors? What might a shift from nuclear operations to ‘environmental remediation’ really entail, apart from a rhetorical move on the part of the nuclear industry—might such a shift reconfigure relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, or bring ecological and societal futures in closer alignment? Preparing to work through such questions ethnographically, the research team finds itself in a stimulating speculative mode that stands, however, in some disciplinary tension with their differing conceptions of what constitutes ‘good science’ or ‘proper scientific writing’.