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Short abstract:

Building on STS work on how expert authority is performed, this paper examines why nuclear policy actors have tried to demarcate two variants of the deficit model: the (psychological) discourse of ‘radiophobia’ and the (economic) discourse of ‘reputational damage’.

Long abstract:

In recent years, concerns about a crisis of expert authority have been expressed across the globe. Japan is no exception to this trend. Scandals surrounding the (mis)management of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster severely damaged public confidence in public institutions, posing an additional challenge for those engaged in radiological protection. This paper examines how claims to expert authority are made in these perceived conditions of low public trust. To this end, it offers an ethnographic account of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA) Workshop on Post-Accident Food Safety Science – an event staged at the request of the Japanese Cabinet Office with the aim of inspiring confidence in Fukushima produce. I analyze the practices through which the organizers craft a credible public persona using the idiom of dramaturgical improvisation; drawing attention to the ‘performed resourcefulness’ with which they adapted extant institutional scripts in response to a discerned crisis of public reason. Concretely, improvisation invites us to consider how and why nuclear policy actors have sought to demarcate two variants of the deficit model: the (psychological) discourse of ‘radiophobia’ and the (economic) discourse of ‘reputational damage’. Where prior scholarship has identified the continuities between the two discourses, attention to this boundary work reveals the dramaturgical advantages of ‘reputational damage’ over ‘radiophobia’ in contesting critics’ claims to the mantle of victimhood, securing international support, and producing the expert’s body as a site of evidence.