Majia holmer Nadesan

Arizona State University West Campus · Social and Behavioral Sciences

In the construction industry, risk governance stems from the standardization of safety policies and procedures. Safety governance is typically communicated and enforced through a top-down, command-and-control approach. Procedures and policies are created at the top level and cascaded down to the work. Individual discretion in the workplace permits...

Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures explores how our dominant carbon and nuclear energy assemblages shape conceptions of participation, risk, and in/securities, and how they might be reengineered to deliver justice and democratic participation in transitioning energy systems.

Experts, news media, and social media commentators struggled to make sense of SARS-CoV-2 January–May 2020 as disease caused by this virus, COVID-19, circulated the globe. This paper represents a longitudinal analysis of the primary narratives produced across expert, media, and social media sources to describe the virus, its phylogenetic origins, an...

Abstract: SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it produces, COVID-19, have not only produced a “public health crisis,” but also triggered a “crisis in public confidence,” exacerbating the extant “polarization crisis” seen as dividing the American public. In this charged context, knowledge has become highly politicized, with many counter-narratives circulatin...

Japan conscripted a disputed number of “comfort women” to sexually service their soldiers in occupied territories during World War II. In the aftermath of war, this apparatus was ignored by international diplomacy, and few survivors related their experiences as sex slaves. However, during the early 1990s, sexual crimes against women achieved intern...

Samuel Levine’s Was Yosef on the Spectrum: Understanding Joseph Through Tora, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources argues that Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel from the Book of Genesis, was possibly autistic. Diagnosing people retrospectively as autistic raises complex “hermeneutic” or interpretive questions, including the possibility that our sele...

Nuclear governmentality is offered as a conceptual contribution to research on energy politics, security studies, and nuclearity. Nuclear governmentality is conceived as a logic of government in the Foucauldian sense, that describes contiguities in conduct and symbolic representations found across disparate dispositifs, especially (albeit not exclu...

"Governmentality Genealogical Analysis of Modern Logics of Government" Sage Research Methods Cases With the dawn of the twenty-first century, catastrophic crises such as the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, the 2010 BP Oil Spill, and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster produced social, economic and environmental effects that reverberated across...

The Problem Radioactive zones have been described as “landscapes of risk” that are often represented by Hanford in the US, Ozersk in Russia, Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and Sellafield in the UK, but also include abandoned mining, refining, and military-industrial sites around the world. The number of sites is unknown because of lapses in record keepi...

Alice Wexler’s Autism in a Decentered World offers a novel epistemology of autism that valorizes autistic ways of experiencing by celebrating the artistic expressions of self-identified autistic people. Wexler launches her project to valorize autistic experience by first deconstructing the narrative fiction upon which modernist conceptions of neuro...

The idea of workplace democracy invokes Western democratic ideals, while simultaneously bringing into relief significant social and environmental challenges facing contemporary organizations under neoliberal capitalism, including growing inequality and resource limits threatening indefinite economic expansion. This entry contextualizes workplace de...

Case Studies: 21st Century Financial Crises; BP Oil Spill; Fukushima Daiichi Theoretical Grounding: Risk Society and Catastrophic Risks (Ulrich Beck) Exacerbated by Centralization (Charles Perrow) Emerging Technologies Studied: “Financialization”: Innovative financial contracts and trading technologies New Carbon-Extractive Technologies: Deepwater...

Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy, and Ecological Sustainability provides a detailed and empirical analysis of the institutions, governing logics, risk-management practices, and crisis communication strategies involved in the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the 2010 BP oil crisis, and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. These human-enginee...

The World Health Organization’s ‘energy ladder’ illustrates the forms of energy found across the globe today, ranging from scavenged animal dung to electricity as fueled primarily by coal, hydropower, and nuclear energy. In this chapter, we argue that this ladder positions catastrophic risks at every rung, including ecological destruction and human...

Majia Nadesan Professor, School of Social and Behavioral Studies ASU Research Presentation at EMERGE (International conference). Scottsdale, AZ, May 26-28, 2015. Most new technologies developed today are evaluated using risk-assessment frameworks aimed at detecting adverse effects for human bodies. This presentation argues that dose-effects models...

Fukushima politics are examined by comparing competing accounts of the March 2011 nuclear disaster and through an examination of the biopolitics of radiation health effects research.

Majia Holmer Nadesan analyzes the Fukushima nuclear disaster and its radiological aftermath for the citizens of Japan and elsewhere in the context of historical and contemporary understandings of radiation-caused health and reproductive effects.

Autism is now considered to be one of the most common developmental disorders today, yet 100 years ago the term did not exist. This book examines the historical and social events that enabled autism to be identified as a distinct disorder in the early twentieth century.

The public health risks from the Fukushima nuclear disaster will take decades to unfold and will be difficult to measure because of uncertainty about the extent of atmospheric and oceanic emissions and because of the challenges of mapping fallout patterns and bio-accumulation. The effect of uncertainty is that risk is privatized, or shifted away fr...

Nuclear energy and nuclear weapons have been historically connected in Japan and elsewhere. Japan’s nuclear energy program, particularly, its breeder reactor program and used fuel reprocessing, has been directly linked to its national security. This chapter explores how nuclear energy became an important foundation of Japan’s national security and...

The Fukushima nuclear disaster crisis management and policy responses are examined in relation to criticism raised by the Japanese Diet that TEPCO and the government failed to adequately protect citizens. The chapter’s analysis of data on contamination in Japan and scientific findings of early effects on fauna suggest possibilities for significant...

Exposure to radiation increases risks for a range of diseases and genetic disorders. Yet, precise dose effects are difficult to predict with certainty because of the complexity of modeling bio-accumulation and bio-magnification processes and because of the historic Cold-War politics of a “permissible dose.” Consequently, extant dose-effects models...

Uncertainty about the scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the manner of fallout deposition, and the dose effects from exposure contribute to the privatization of risks as externalities are experienced by impacted citizens as personal tragedies. Ironically, nuclear has been the crux of security, despite its deleterious effects producing the mos...

Over the last several years, Western audiences have been treated to a steady stream of post-apocalyptic disaster films. In this chapter, Majia Nadesan discusses The Road, The Book of Eli, and 9, arguing that these films can be distinguished thematically from the more general disaster genre by their exclusive focus on post-disaster survival and thei...

Neoliberalism is a logic of government that emphasizes the values of personal responsibility and ownership in a context of market deregulation and privatization. Neoliberalism represents and transforms social relations using market-based financial frameworks and problem-solution frames. Neoliberalism seeks to collapse society into an aggregate of e...

In the spring of 2010, major newspapers in the U.S. announced arrival of a “recovery” from the economic recession precipitated by the 2008 financial crisis. This essay examines the biopolitics of recovery in the wake of the disaster capitalism of the financial meltdown, arguing that twentieth-century social welfare biopolitics that derived wealth f...

The Problem of TransparencyTransparency: Fiscal HistoryConclusion: Transparency and the “Free Market”References

Contemporary children are regarded as at risk for ill-health effects from a wide variety of environmental and biological perils. Environmental perils range from toxic substances such as lead and mercury to the nutritional deficiencies of high-fat, fast-food diets. Biological perils range from external threats such as contagious diseases to “inborn”...

The previous chapters have addressed the biopolitical risks posed to and by children at the turn of the twenty-first century. This chapter concludes this book by exploring these risks in relation to the momentous events surrounding the financial depression that began in 2007. The discussion draws upon ideas and themes developed in previous chapters...

The contemporary child is at risk from countless unseen dangers, while burdened with the responsibility for assuming the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve economic and social success. It is no wonder that childhood is today fraught with perils and risks, requiring expert guidance. Have children always borne so much risk and responsibility?...

Biopolitics approaches population as a political and scientific problem-space. Contemporary biopolitics operates primarily, although not exclusively, through security mechanisms rather than disciplinary ones. This chapter specifically addresses how populations, particularly childhood populations, are constituted in political and social policy as na...

As explained in chapter 2, biopolitical issues and threats to the health and vitality of the nation were, from the eighteenth century forward, conceptualized in relation to economic formulations of national strength and capital accumulation. Western biopolitical strategies for governing children have, therefore, often been formulated in relation to...

Across time, children in Western cultures have been understood as threatening beings aligned with satanic influences, as miniature adults, as fragile creatures of God, as delinquents, and as vulnerable, at-risk beings. In exploring these historically specific formulations of childhood, academic and cultural observers have drawn attention to the com...

Introduction How do medical and scientific understandings of the body, the brain, and the mind shape everyday people's understandings of themselves and social others? How might these understandings produce and reproduce hierarchical social relationships? More generally, how are medical and scientific practices tied up with power relationships? Mich...

Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life synthesizes and extends the disparate strands of scholarship on Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower and grounds them in familiar social contexts including the private realm, the market, and the state/military. Topics include public health, genomics, behavioral genetics, neoliberal market l...

Recent developments in managerial theory and practice practically ensure the continued widespread use of personality testing (Miller & Rose, 1990). In this article I argue why communication theorists ought to attend to the ontology of personhood implied in the discourse of personality exams and the biopolitics associated with the exams, implementat...

In this chapter I take up the significance of Calvin O. Schrag's view of the embodied self for the study of organizational communication and, more generally, for the study of organizations. Schrag's ontology of the embodied self provides the grounds for critiquing contemporary organizational practices that invoke modernist dualisms that bifurcate t...

This essay re-situates current neurological research on infant brain development in terms of a matrix of cultural practices and pre-occupations. It contends that infant 'brain science' functions - in conjunction with the marketing promises of developmental toy manufacturers - as a form of 'ritual magic' (Nelson-Rowe, 1994) that ensures the transfor...

For women in contemporary corporate life, negotiating and performing a “professional” identity is a process requiring much time, energy, and self‐surveillance. Yet, many women feel compelled to undertake this project despite the challenges it poses. These women often turn to popular success literature for strategies to help them craft and enact suc...

“Should your company save your soul?” asks Fortune magazine in 1991. This article explores the growth of literature proposing corporate spirituality as a means of motivating employees. Critical analysis of this literature suggests that it articulates and advocates two entrepreneurial views of subjecthood (i.e., personal identity) that obscure conte...

This article illustrates how the popular success literature operates as a colonizing force that furthers corporations’ capacity to affect the conditions for the expression of personal identity. The discourse's power stems from its intersection with the broader social codes of consumer culture and through its appropriation of “entrepreneurial” views...

We argue that a woman's decision to breast‐feed or not is overdetermined by two discursive complexes we label “the romance of the natural mother” and “the science of breast‐feeding.” These complexes incorporate socio‐historical articulations of motherhood, female sexuality, medicine, science, and advertising. Taken together, they dictate the perfor...

In this essay I explore the role of time in proximal and distal approaches to organizational analysis. I argue that an instrumental and linear view of time may undermine efforts to describe organizations as partial and contingent processes. Therefore, I supplement instrumental time with a discontinuous and non-teleological account, using A. Giddens...

This essay provides a nonessentializing account of how gender affects the social construction of time in communicative interactions. Niklas Luhmann's systems theory serves as the theoretical framework for explaining how time is constructed through communication codes. Using Luhmann's model, the essay argues that gender is a communication code that...

Post-Structuralism has been criticized for reducing individuals to subject positions. This essay responds to this criticism by illustrating how individuals positioned as subjects reflect upon and challenge their socially ascribed identities. More specifically, it examines how a group of women 'service workers' employed by a public university respon...

Thesis (M.A.)--San Diego State University, 1989. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-218).