Livestream

Global Online Launch of the first Uranium Atlas

The Uranium Atlas tells the global story of uranium through maps, graphics and narratives covering every phase of the uranium fuel chain. The raw material of the Atomic Age was or is mostly mined in African countries, Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada, and the consequences for the inhabitants of these mining areas have been fatal from the very beginning. The victims of global nuclear colonialism are mostly Indigenous peoples whose voices remain unheard.

July 16 is seared in the memory of New Mexicans: On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 in the morning, scientists from Los Alamos detonated Trinity, the first atomic bomb, in the White Sands desert. On July 16, 1979, at 5:30 in the morning, the tailings dam of the Church Rock uranium mill broke, contaminating the drinking water of the Diné (Navajo) people.

We dedicate the launch of the Uranium Atlas to all the victims of July 16.

Despite the disastrous consequences of mining, arms testing and nuclear disasters, Europe, with 124 nuclear reactors, remains the world’s largest consumer of uranium, while North America is home to another 114 reactors. Not even the economic fiasco of new reactors has been able to sufficiently weaken the nuclear lobby. Uranium mining continues and could be expanded in North America, Africa and elsewhere. Meanwhile, radioactive waste – 350,000 tonnes worldwide – keeps piling up with no safe place to go. These and every aspect of uranium’s use – and abuse – are highlighted in the Uranium Atlas and will be presented during the event, which will include a question and answer session with the audience.

The international guests participating in this event are: Makoma Lekalakala (Earthlife Africa, South Africa), Ian Zabarte (Western Shoshone Nation, USA), Sascha Hach (Nuclear Free Future Foundation, Germany) and Anna Rondon (New Mexico Social Justice and Equity Institute, Navajo Nation, USA). There will be additional recorded statements from Tina Cordova (Trinity Downwinders, USA) and Larry King (Navajo Nation, USA).

The online launch will be hosted by Linda Pentz Gunter (Beyond Nuclear, USA) and Claus Biegert (Nuclear Free Future Foundation, Germany). It is jointly co-organized by Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Nuclear Free Future Foundation, Beyond Nuclear, IPPNW, oekoem e.V. and Münchener Zukunftssalon.

For the last few years, the Green New Deal or GND has been the watchword of large parts of the international Left. Envisioning a massive, state-funded overhaul of the global economy towards sustainable production and agriculture, it was crucial to the visions put forward by Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and gave millions hope that there was a viable alternative to neoliberal capitalism and climate catastrophe in the near- to medium-term. Some critics argue, however, that the GND fails to take realities in the Global South into account – specifically, the amount of rare metals and other resources that would need to be extracted from the ground in order to build the renewable infrastructure that underpins the Green New Deal. Can these interests be reconciled? Can we envision a world that is both environmentally sustainable and socially just? We’ll be speaking with Maristella Svampa of the Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, a new Latin American initiative based around similar principles as the GND but with a distinct emphasis on the Global South, to find out. With Maristella Svampa, an Argentine sociologist, researcher, and activist.

Luxemburg Lecture of Anna M. Agathangelou (York University, Toronto)

Luxemburg Lecture, Tuesday, 7th of June 2020, 7 p.m. (CEST)

White supremacy along with COVID-19 have been lethal with 505 500 dead globally so far which disproportionately affects Black, visible minorities and migrants worldwide. Simultaneously, LGBTQ+ and black oppression are inscribed in global racial capitalism that orients itself toward certain possibilities by accessing and experimenting with social reproduction and life.

In her lecture, Anna M. Agathangelou argues that abolition demands of us to understand how certain forms of queerness emerge as an instituted perspective, a frame, and an operation separated from other forms of violence and power. She investigates this emerging instituted perspective from the vantage point of anti-blackness, the global lethality of white supremacy, and global racial capitalism. Employing a radical queer/black feminist anti-capitalist poetics, she argues for the need of a radical anti-capitalist and anti-white supremacy analytical impulse. By grappling with the ways these emerging institutionalities – with regard to radical anti-capitalist queerness and in conjunction with anti-blackness – are moving to imagine anti-capitalist futures beyond the current map of globality whose ontological horizons are limited by raciality. She also engages with Black Lives Matter movement, Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon´s radical critique of global racial capitalism.  In conclusion, she shows that contemporary Covid-19 structures of violence demand new ways of thinking abolition where queerness and anti-blackness are no longer turned into figures of innovation for capital but rather sites and poetries of unshackling the fetishes and fantasies impoverishing the world.

In cooperation with the Section of Politics and Gender/German Association for Political Sciences  and the working group of Politics and Gender, Institute for Political Sciences, University of Marburg.

Hosted by Katharina Pühl(RLS) und Inga Nüthen (Universität Marburg).

Anna M. Agathangelou teaches at York University, Toronto at the Department of Politics.  She is the co-editor (with Kyle D. Killian) of Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations. (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives (2016), co-editor of (with Nevzat Soguk) of Arab Revolutions and World Transformations (2013), co-author with L.H.M. Ling, of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (2009) and author of the Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (2004).