With current crises of academic relevance and legitimacy, there is a need for epistemic equity inherent to community-engaged research. Scholars in science communication and science and technology studies have analyzed, advocated for, and conducted public engagement in pursuit of this goal. However, despite desires to celebrate public engagement, US academic institutions and organizations often present barriers to meaningful community-engaged research. From tenure and promotion requirements, to lack of recognition and resources, universities in the American academic landscape are not currently organized to support such work. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework to examine the complex structural dimensions of academic institutions that have systematically discouraged and devalued faculty participation in community-engaged scholarship. We outline four such structural dimensions: interrogating epistemic biases, neoliberalist tendencies, gendered norms, and colonial-racist defaults. Our goal is to illuminate processes that could inform interventions to bridge the gap between academic aspirations for community-engaged work and current actions in the academy that undermine it.

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Canada's siting process for spent nuclear fuel, led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), is frequently held within nuclear industry spheres as an exemplary siting process, designed to be inclusive, participatory, and “community-driven.” Drawing from ethnographic observations of the process as it unfolded in Southern Ontario, Canada, this paper focuses on the epistemic issues of how diverse knowledges are treated in the process, whose knowledge is valued, how such knowledges are understood, and whose knowledges are excluded. In particular, I make sense of how epistemic tensions in the process are produced by being situated within a nuclear landscape, informed by local nuclear-dominant socio-technical relations and epistemic regimes, which exceptionalize pro-nuclear Western scientific knowledges. This socio-technical constellation, I suggest, leads to careful but sometimes paradoxical negotiations of the expert/lay divide that subsequently reveals cracks in the policy foundation for inclusion of diverse forms of knowledge. While the NWMO policy framework discursively values diverse knowledges, critical lay community knowledges are often delegitimized and dismissed. Similarly, there are scalar issues in the ways Indigenous knowledges are homogenized and devalued through discursive separation. These epistemic tensions, between how knowledges should be treated in policy, and how knowledges are actually treated in practice, demonstrate clear issues of recognition justice, participatory fairness, and inclusion of diverse knowledges. The implications of this work shed light on understanding the complexities of landscape-based knowledge politics and how they might inform siting practices and technological decision-making more broadly.

Nuclear histories are global yet worryingly incomplete. Linking a plutonium refinery in Washington, a uranium mine in Saskatchewan, a tsunami at Fukushima, a nuclear bomb test site in Rajasthan, a reactor ‘accident’ at Chernobyl, a shipping accident in the English Channel, and a president-to-prime-minister confrontation over the US-Canada frontier, these quasi-autobiographical essays prove the importance of public archives, personal files with fragments, oral histories, and private recollections. This is the social history, business history, environmental history, labour history, scientific and technological history, and indigenous history of the twentieth century. Hiding in Plain Sight offers everyone an entry to the irregularities of our ‘disorderly nuclear world’, and offers other researchers crucial insights to what richness lies within.