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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how participatory film can communicate the relations between the material histories and local meanings of place and community alongside the UK's nuclear industry. It examines the role of infrastructural presences in how proximate publics make sense of their industrial past.

Paper long abstract:

The paper anticipates the use of participatory film as part of a wider methodology, including archival and ethnographic work, in developing a politics of communication between core and periphery communities in the UK's nuclear industry. The core community is the scientists, the policy-makers and the bureaucratic workers, while the periphery pertains to communities that host nuclear infrastructure like power stations and waste and storage facilities, as well as workers who build the infrastructure.

It takes into consideration the relations between the material histories and presences of energy industries more generally to suggest how multiple meanings of place and community can be formed. It recognises the affects present in infrastructural presences (and absences) in how proximate publics make sense of their industrial past, and the significance of this for their hopes and expectations about the future. 

This temporal focus also comes to the fore in how communication is conceived. What is the relationship between the temporalities of materials and the temporalities of people who live alongside them? How can our knowledge systems conceive of the deep time of nuclear materials? This paper offers novel approaches to the use of participatory film in conceiving of nuclear temporalities by drawing on film-influences theories of time and Bakhtin's literary notion of the chronotope.