Shannon Cram receives Julian Steward Award

IAS faculty member, Shannon Cram, received the 2024 Julian Steward Award for her book, Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility. Awarded by the Anthropology & Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association, this award recognizes “the best monograph in environmental and ecological anthropology” each year.

The Julian Steward Award committee wrote the following about Cram’s book, which was published by University of California Press in 2023.

“The winner of the 2024 Julian Steward Award extends themes of chronic toxicity and forging futures within ecological crises in deeply personal and affective ways. Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility, by Shannon Cram, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, introduces us to quotidian life in Hanford, Washington. Established as part of the Manhattan project, Hanford produced nearly two-thirds of the plutonium used in the US Nuclear stockpile. Now it is one of the country’s largest superfund sites. Cram examines the numerous efforts and frequent failures to define and measure the harms of radiation, exploring the various other forms of harm, including epistemic and gendered harm, that these measurement attempts produce. This is an exquisitely written, and profoundly intimate, portrait of the impossibility of environmental cleanup of radiation. In sparse but cutting prose, Cram unfolds the spaces in which the future of the decommissioned Hanford nuclear site is forged: by activists, workers, proximate residents, and the ethnographer herself…Working against the managerial logics of environmental cleanup efforts, which are tasked with imagining a future of waste that will long outlast the United States itself, Cram confronts the reader with the existential uncertainty of living on a planet with materials that can destroy, and that have already taken so much life.”