From the late 1940s through the mid 1980s, uranium from the Diné (Navajo) homeland was used to produce more than half of the raw materials of the nuclear weapons that bombed Japan, fueled the Cold War arms race, and powered the nuclear plants that kept American consumers in affordable electricity. This talk brings together environmental history and environmental justice studies to understand the history of uranium mining as emerging from a process that Traci Brynne Voyles calls wastelanding, a process of rendering a space marginal, worthless, and pollutable.

Traci Brynne Voyles is Professor and Head of the Department of History at North Carolina State University. She is the author of two books: The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Caughey Prize for best work on the American West, and Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

This lecture is part of the conference "Global Legacies of Anti-Nuclear Activism: Intersectional Perspectives," which the Capps Center is proud to co-sponsor.

In partnership with NYU Abu Dhabi and co-sponsored by: Nature, Ethics, and Technology Program; Walter H. Capps Center; Institute for Humanities and Social Change; Global Latinidades Center; Erickson Endowed Chair; UCSB Human Rights Board; Student Commission on Racial Equity; UCSB Environmental Justice Alliance; Dept. of Religious Studies; Dept. of Environmental Studies; Center for Women, Gender, and Sexual Equity; Carsey-Wolf Center; Dept. of History; Dept. of Feminist Studies; Dept. of Global Studies; Santa Barbara Women’s Commission; International Uranium Film Festival.