“A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado”

Operating in the tradition of the atlases and counter-maps developed by critical and activist scholars, “A People’s Atlas of
Nuclear Colorado” is a collectively authored digital project documenting and interpreting the sites, issues, policies, and
cultures associated with the American nuclear weapons complex as it enters its ninth decade. With more than forty
contributors to date, the Atlas collects and cross-references many types of knowledge, affective registers, and forms of
evidence: maps, photographs, and descriptions of major and minor nuclear sites; issue briefs offering historical and
policy contexts; artworks responding to nuclear legacies; and scholarly essays connecting Colorado’s specific atomic
histories to broader issues concerning environmental justice, technoscientific practice, the formation of a nuclear
citizenry, and the performance and projection of hegemony. In this presentation, co-editors Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh
Krupar position the Atlas in relation to their larger bodies of work, discuss their approach to building the social
infrastructures that created and maintain the Atlas, and demonstrate how the experimental interface design resists at
the level of form the compartmentalization and black-boxing of military and industrial nuclear discourses.