Shannon Cram receives Honorable Mention for Gregory Bateson Book Prize

IAS faculty member, Shannon Cram, received an Honorable Mention for the Gregory Bateson Book Prize. Awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), the Bateson Prize “looks to single out work that is theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, and in the spirit of the tradition for which the SCA has been known: interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative.”

The Bateson Prize jury wrote the following about Cram’s book, Unmaking the Bomb, which was published by University of California Press in 2023.

“In this masterful and disturbing book, Shannon Cram asks us to consider how we come to fight for the fiction of environmental clean-up, in the face of nuclear contamination that exceeds technical control and promises to outlive our political institutions. Unmaking the Bomb is the product of decades of engaged presence, engaged thought, at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and Cram manages to distill this knowledge, and the rage it produces into a profound and chilling text. Her feminist approach to the technoscientific models and metrics that sanitize the nuclear weapons industry interrupts their false promise of control through ethnographic, auto-ethnographic and archival turns to the realities they fail to fully apprehend. The result is a book that is as deep as it is uncomfortable. The committee commends Cram for her dexterity in moving across scales, methods, and vantage points to produce a devastating truth (no longer) hiding in plain sight.”