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Roughly a third of the above-ground nuclear blasts in Earth’s history have taken place on the coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean. In my paper for this conference, I argue that the US approach to weapons testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands drew on a long tradition of scientific visitors treating such coral formations as though they were indistinguishable from one another. I also show how this logic was subverted when the displaced islanders of Enewetak atoll mounted a successful legal challenge in the early 1970s to a US Air Force plan to continue using the reef as a site for “cratering” experiments with conventional explosives. This act of local resistance forced scientists to abandon the older conceit that atolls were interchangeable, and instead to argue that the weapons testing had transformed Enewetak from a literal “control atoll” (during the initial US blasts at Bikini) into a unique artefact of forty-three nuclear detonations. It is apt to recall this episode here in Honolulu, not only because this archipelago has also been a site of resistance to weapons testing by the U.S. military but moreover because the specific coral-cratering experiments that were blocked at Enewetak ended up being pursued on the reef of Hawai‘i Island instead.

Sponsel, Alistar. 2023. "Coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean, Marshall Island (Bikini and Enewetak Atoll) and Hawai'i." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Place-making practices refer to the ways in which people create and define physical spaces as meaningful and significant through their everyday activities and social interactions.[1] In Ethnography, the study of these practices is often referred to as ‘ethnography as place-making,’ which involves the exploration of the cultural meanings and practices that shape the physical and social environments in which people live. This can include examining how people create and maintain social boundaries, how they express their identities and values through the built environment,[2] and how they negotiate power and control over the spaces they inhabit.

This place in Gröpelingen is made a place through the interaction of the people tending to the urban gardening project. 

1. Pink 2008, 178ff. 

2. See: urbanization 

3. Pink 2008, 190. 

"Far from being anti-science and anti-education, BP has successfully embedded itself at the heart of elite UK science and education policy and practice networks – in particular, networks focused on development and delivery of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Rather than limiting itself to the narrow promotion of pro-petroleum rhetoric, BP has long seen its interests as being best served by the general promotion of pro-business practices and values throughout UK public education. Petro-pedagogy, in the case of BP at least, is best understood as a core component of a more extensive corporate education reform network that, for the past decade, has focused on promoting a neoliberal model of STEM education in schools" p. 475

"This brings us back to the argument of Eaton and Day (2019) that began this article: to tackle the crisis of climate change, we ‘need to dismantle the corporate power of the fossil fuel industries and their petro-pedagogy’ (15). Doing this, however, will require a far different model of STEM education: one that can help students ‘understand how manipulative politics, economic power and myth making PR are subverting public democratic will,’ and encourage ‘young people to apprentice as critical scientific policy analysts,’ and ‘create innovative counter-narratives to the old dysfunctional stories of intensifying carbon dependence’ (Elshof 2011, 15)." p.486