Colloquium: Olga Kuchinskaya

Responses by: Suzanne Staggenborg (Department of Sociology) and Lisa Parker (Department of Human Genetics and Center for Bioethics and Health Law)

Humanities Center Colloquium Events typically involve conversations around a pre-distributed piece of writing.

The Humanities Center welcomes Olga Kuchinskaya (Ph.D.), Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh, as a  Pitt Faculty Fellow in the Center.

Kuchinskaya's book, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (MIT, 2014) examines how we know what we know about the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, the largest nuclear accident to date. The analysis describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl health effects: practices that displace radiation and its health effects as an object of public attention and scientific research, and make them unobservable. Olga is also interested in the production of knowledge and ignorance about other environmental hazards, especially imperceptible hazards that require scientific expertise and tools to be established as hazards in the first place.