This is a story of kinship, grief, and place that asks an impossible question. Is there a connection between a sister’s illness and Manhattan Project nuclear waste in North St. Louis? It is a story of commingled histories of harm that plume outward, across boundaries engineered to separate and contain, and of community activism challenging norms of “security.” To hold together parallel forms of protest—against fast death caused by racist policing and slow death caused by military-scientific-industrial disregard—means moving beyond individuated grief to recognition of the entangled terrors of racial capitalism and nuclear colonialism that produce everyday carcinogenic relations. To do so is to fall into the world, mapped by material, embodied connections between St. Louis, Hiroshima, Hanford, and the Marshall Islands. This lecture explores telling terrible stories in a way that centers relationality and compels us to seek repair instead of closure.

Sasha Welland is Chair & Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. She will be joined in conversation for this event by Holly M. Barker (Teaching Professor of Anthropology and Curator for Oceanic & Asian Culture at the Burke Museum) and Shannon Cram (Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell).

Free and open to the public (no registration, seating open until filled).