Paper short abstract:

With a focus on digital media, and (audio)visual reproductions, this paper examines the scope for collaborating in movements for a people-orientated and safe, nuclear-free planet.

Paper long abstract:

With a focus on digital media, and (audio)visual reproductions, this paper examines the scope for collaborating in movements for a people-orientated and safe, nuclear-free planet. The main case study in question is a small and remote fishing village on the southern tip of India that since 2012 has found itself at the epicentre of an anti-nuclear movement drawn into regional, national and international spheres of communication and networks. Located next to the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, Idinthakarai is home to fishing communities who have been pulled into an anti-nuclear movement, a campaign that at one point even managed to stall the construction of a nuclear power plant for five months. In this presentation, I discuss my involvement with the local residents and assess to what extent their activities, both participatory and mediated, enhanced their politics and poetics of protest. Whilst anthropology has been conventionally associated with the sanctioned practice of participant-observation for the last hundred years or so, I make a case for participatory-engagement in a context in which 'sitting on the fence' becomes no longer a feasible option.