Two Paradigmatic Waves of Public Discourse on Nuclear Waste in the United States, 1945-2009: Understanding a Magnitudinal and Longitudinal Phenomenon in Anthropological Terms

Abstract

This project set out to illuminate the discursive existence of nuclear waste in American culture. Given the significant temporal dimension of the phenomenon as well as the challenging size of the United States setting, the project adapted key methodological elements of the sociocultural anthropology tradition and produced proxies for ethnographic fieldnotes and key informant interviews through sampling the digital archives of the New York Times over a 64-year period that starts with the first recorded occurrence of the notion of nuclear waste and ends with the conclusion of the presidency of George W. Bush. Two paradigmatic waves of American public discourse on nuclear waste come to light when subjecting this empirical data to quantitative inventorying and interpretive analysis: between 1945 and 1969 nuclear waste was generally framed in light of the beneficial utilizations of nuclear reactions and with optimistic expectations for a scientific/technological solution; by contrast, between 1969 and 2009 nuclear waste was conceptualized as inherited harm that could not be undone and contestation that required political/legal management. Besides this key finding and the empirical timing of the two paradigms, the study’s value lies also with its detailed empirical documentation of nuclear waste in its sociocultural existence.

Quantitative Falsification for Qualitative Findings: Falsifying an Ethnographic Theory of American Public Discourse on Nuclear Waste With Text Mining in R

“…The findings that are the object of this project’s tests of falsification were drawn from the researcher’s qualitative and interpretive analyses of a proxy for ethnographic field notes that, after cleaning for duplicates, consisted of 685 records from the historical archives of the New York Times : 566 articles, 57 letters to the editor, 50 front-page articles, 18 editorials, and 2 other formats, which appeared in the newspaper between the years 1945 and 2009, and were sampled through querying its online archive as made available through the Lexis Nexis database for records that included in their headlines the keyword “nuclear” or one of its historical/contextual synonyms “atomic” or “radioactive” together with the keyword “waste” (Pajo, 2016); 8 items of this original sample were removed and not included in the present analysis and tests because upon further review, they were found to diverge from the nuclear waste focus of the samples.…”

“…To this researcher, the prompt for addressing the epistemic dimensions of ethnography came with the completion of a project on the sociocultural existence of nuclear waste (Pajo, 2015, 2016). The initial purpose of that effort was to understand anthropologically nuclear waste not in its material existence but in its sociocultural existence and specifically as arising in public discourse in the United States.…”

“…These circumstances and requisites compelled this researcher to venture into some degree of methodological innovation. Limiting the project’s focal time frame to the first six and a half decades of nuclear waste’s discursive existence, the years 1945 through 2009 that were nicely bookended by the first mention of the concept of nuclear waste in newsprint and the end of the presidency of George W. Bush, the researcher substituted for ethnographic field notes a sample of records from the archives of the self-declared printer of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” the New York Times (Pajo, 2016). Even though, as a peer reviewer of this present article noted, newspaper articles may indeed not be the exact equivalent of an ethnographer’s field notes, as the researcher had previously noted:the pages of the New York Times recorded the voices of a great number of individuals: not only reporters and editors but also readers whose published addresses and feedback to the newspaper regarding what they read in its pages and what they perceived to happen in the world around them, though editorially controlled, represent a sampling of voices from a substantial pool.…”

“…So the New York Times is best positioned also for serving as a proxy for the knowledgeable and articulate individual that conventional ethnographic research designates as ‘key informant’. (Pajo, 2015)Systematic interpretive analysis of this de facto ethnographic repository then led to a number of findings and conclusions that are noteworthy and can even be impactful for challenging certain key positions of extant scholarship on the topic (Pajo, 2015; Pajo, 2016).…”

The Construction of Goshute Political Identity: Negotiation of Voice Regarding Nuclear Waste Policy Development

“…Central to that issue are the cultural, political, and environmental ramifications of placing nuclear waste management facilities on Native American reservations and the role of Native American tribes in the management of our nation's nuclear waste (Kuletz, 1998;LaDuke, 2001;Clarke, 2002Clarke, , 2010Lewis, 2007;Endres, 2009a,b;Burger et al, 2010a;Nelson, 2014;Pajo, 2016).…”