G Hecht
Biographic Data
| ID | 7344 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Hecht |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Hecht |
| SIGNATURE | HECHT G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1445-0785 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 320 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Author Response to Murray, “The troubled legacies of gold mining in South Africa
It’s one thing for a review to offer critique and disagreement. I’ve had plenty of those, and I enjoy the challenge they pose. And we’ve all seen reviews that, like this one, slam the author for no
Gabrielle Hecht’s response
Residual Governance
International audience
Cenizas del Antropoceno
Este artículo ofrece una crítica transdiciplinaria a la abstracción capitalista de la "carbono-neutralidad" a partir de un análisis situado de la producción de energía para la gran minería de cobre y, recientemente, también de litio en la ciudad de Tocopilla (norte de Chile). Al examinar las transformaciones sociales y materiales gatilladas por la producción de energía para la gran minería durante el siglo XX, este trabajo problematiza dicha neut…
Systemic and Epistemic Racism in the History of Technology
Systemic and Epistemic Racism in the History of Technology Chandra Bhimull (bio), Gabrielle Hecht (bio), Edward Jones-Imhotep (bio), Chakanetsa Mavhunga (bio), Lisa Nakamura (bio), and Asif Siddiqi (bio) Keywords Systemic Racism, Epistemic Racism, History of Technology, racism Concerns about racism—systemic and otherwise—have circulated within the Society for the History of Technology for many years. But it is only in tandem with recent U.S. upri…
Toxicité et invisibilisation. Nucléaire, rapports postcoloniaux et justice environnementale
La Terre à l'envers
L'extraction industrielle met la Terre sens dessus dessous, augmentant massivement la quantité, la dispersion et la durabilité des déchets produits dans le monde. Les minéraux africains ont joué un rôle particulièrement important dans cette dynamique, en étant simultanément moteurs de et produits dans la violence, y compris la violence sourde des dommages environnementaux et du capitalisme racial. Cet article explore ces processus en étudiant deu…
La « nucléarité » de l’Afrique
Uranium africain. Une histoire globale est le deuxième ouvrage de l’historienne américaine Gabrielle Hecht, professeure à l’université du Michigan et spécialiste de l’histoire des sciences et des techniques. Ses travaux sur le nucléaire l’ont conduit à publier en 1998 un livre précurseur intitulé The Radiance of France : Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II1. C’est un travail qui s’inscrit dans une approche latourienne où l’aute…
Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene
How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion's potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame. Navigating the Anthropocene from Africa requires attending to scale both as an analytic and an actor category. In ord…
AHR Conversation
On the Importance of the Visual … and of Mentoring
On the Importance of the Visual ... and of Mentoring Gabrielle Hecht (bio) “You do realize that Tom Hughes is the 900-pound gorilla in the history of technology, don’t you?” The question came from one of his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s History and Sociology of Science Department. I’d never heard the idiom before, but its meaning was clear enough. And—incredible as this may seem in retrospect—the answer was no, I didn’t know. Wh…
Nuclear Janitors
The hydrogen explosions at the three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in March 2011 launched one of the largest disasters in industrial history. A year after the Japanese government declared that the reactors were under control, experts continued to find radioactive leaks. According to TEPCO's latest estimate, cleaning up the mess-removing fuel rods and debris, decommissioning the reactors, and decontaminating some of the surroundings-will …
The Work of Invisibility
This article explores the technopolitical mechanisms by which radiation hazards in South African uranium production were rendered invisible. The occupational health effects of underground uranium mining were deeply contested for decades, all over the world. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the volatile nature of labor relations under apartheid shaped how the South African mining industry responded to the presence of radon gas. With occasional help fr…
AHR Conversation
Hopes for the Radiated Body
This article explores the transnational politics of technology and science at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia. During the 1980s, Rössing workers refashioned surveillance technologies into methods for trade union action. When national independence in 1990 failed to produce radical ruptures in the workplace, union leaders engaged in technopolitical strategies of extraversion, and became knowledge producers about their own exposure to workplace …
History and the Technopolitics of Identity
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for West…
The Power of Nuclear Things
This essay explores three historical genealogies of U.S. President George W. Bush's infamous 2003 claim that Saddam Hussein sought "uranium from Africa" to fuel nuclear weapons. First, it considers the problem of when uranium counts as a "nuclear" thing, when it doesn't, and what Africa has to do with it. Second, it explores how Niger's politics, priorities, and conflicts have shaped the production and distribution of its uranium. Third, it exami…
The Radiance of France
How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. In the aftermath of World War II, as France sought a distinctive role for itself in the modern, postcolonial world, the nation and its leaders enthusiastically embraced large technological projects in general and nuclear power in particular. The Radiance of France asks how it happened t…
Africa and the Nuclear World
What is Africa's place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any 'nuclear activities.' Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were 'exposed to higher amounts of internal radia…
A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things
What things make a state "nuclear," what makes things "nuclear," and how do we know? The degree to which—and purpose for which—a nation, a program, a technology, or a material counts as "nuclear" is not always a matter of consensus. Nuclearity depends on history and geography, science and technology, bodies and politics, radiation and race, states and capitalism. It is not so much an essential property of things, as it is distributed in things. S…
Nuclear Ontologies
Negotiating Global Nuclearities
Throughout most of its history, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been portrayed as a technical agency in which geopolitics are either extraneous or inappropriate. This chapter argues that this separation of technology and politics was discursive and never enacted in practice. Looking at the role of South Africa in the early history of the agency, this chapter shows that the IAEA's technopolitical regime was the continually contes…
Controversial Project Siting
Globalization meets frankenstein? Reflections on terrorism, nuclearity, and global technopolitical discourse
Post 9/11 discourse has important origins in Cold War technopolitical hierarchies that equated "nuclear" with colonizing nations and "non-nuclear" with colonized peoples. This paper gives examples of such equations in order to illuminate the place of nuclearity in current global technopolitics
Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age
Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene
How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion's potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame. Navigating the Anthropocene from Africa requires attending to scale both as an analytic and an actor category. In ord…
History and the Technopolitics of Identity
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for West…
Nuclear Ontologies
Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age
This paper explores two places usually left off nuclear maps: Madagascar and Gabon, where the French mined and processed uranium ore, starting in the 1950s. It analyses how the ‘rupture-talks’ of nuclearity and decolonization became intertwined, first by examining the production of these rupture-talks by French expatriates, then by exploring how sociotechnical practices at each site both belied and performed claims to rupture for Malagasy and Gab…
A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things
What things make a state "nuclear," what makes things "nuclear," and how do we know? The degree to which—and purpose for which—a nation, a program, a technology, or a material counts as "nuclear" is not always a matter of consensus. Nuclearity depends on history and geography, science and technology, bodies and politics, radiation and race, states and capitalism. It is not so much an essential property of things, as it is distributed in things. S…
AHR Conversation
The Power of Nuclear Things
This essay explores three historical genealogies of U.S. President George W. Bush's infamous 2003 claim that Saddam Hussein sought "uranium from Africa" to fuel nuclear weapons. First, it considers the problem of when uranium counts as a "nuclear" thing, when it doesn't, and what Africa has to do with it. Second, it explores how Niger's politics, priorities, and conflicts have shaped the production and distribution of its uranium. Third, it exami…
Negotiating Global Nuclearities
Throughout most of its history, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been portrayed as a technical agency in which geopolitics are either extraneous or inappropriate. This chapter argues that this separation of technology and politics was discursive and never enacted in practice. Looking at the role of South Africa in the early history of the agency, this chapter shows that the IAEA's technopolitical regime was the continually contes…
Hopes for the Radiated Body
This article explores the transnational politics of technology and science at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia. During the 1980s, Rössing workers refashioned surveillance technologies into methods for trade union action. When national independence in 1990 failed to produce radical ruptures in the workplace, union leaders engaged in technopolitical strategies of extraversion, and became knowledge producers about their own exposure to workplace …
Africa and the Nuclear World
What is Africa's place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any 'nuclear activities.' Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were 'exposed to higher amounts of internal radia…
Peasants, Engineers, and Atomic Cathedrals
Since the end of World War II, technological prowess has proved a dominant theme in French political and cultural discourse about national identity and grandeur.' Postwar technocratic planners portrayed technological development as the ultimate embodiment of Frenchness and saw state-driven modernization as a means to unify, even homogenize, the French nation.2 More recently, the excitement surrounding feats such as the force de frappe, the Concor…
The Work of Invisibility
This article explores the technopolitical mechanisms by which radiation hazards in South African uranium production were rendered invisible. The occupational health effects of underground uranium mining were deeply contested for decades, all over the world. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the volatile nature of labor relations under apartheid shaped how the South African mining industry responded to the presence of radon gas. With occasional help fr…
Enacting Cultural Identity
On 16 October 1969, Marcel Boiteux, the president of Electricite de France (EDF), visited his company's Saint-Laurent nuclear site. He announced that the national electric utility would stop building the gas-graphite reactors which had until then constituted the core of France's nuclear programme and served as one of the most prominent technological embodiments of French national grandeur. The very next day, in a dramatic coincidence of time and …
La Terre à l'envers
L'extraction industrielle met la Terre sens dessus dessous, augmentant massivement la quantité, la dispersion et la durabilité des déchets produits dans le monde. Les minéraux africains ont joué un rôle particulièrement important dans cette dynamique, en étant simultanément moteurs de et produits dans la violence, y compris la violence sourde des dommages environnementaux et du capitalisme racial. Cet article explore ces processus en étudiant deu…
Controversial Project Siting
The Radiance of France
Modernity and National Identity in Postwar France
Rebels and Pioneers
This paper compares the cultural meanings of `work' and `risk' at two French nuclear sites, run by different institutions in the 1950s and 1960s. Differences between the two sites stemmed not from technological constraints, but from differences in the political, social and cultural ideologies espoused by each institution. Responses to risk, for example, were as much responses to larger ideological constructs as they were responses to danger. Thro…
Cenizas del Antropoceno
Este artículo ofrece una crítica transdiciplinaria a la abstracción capitalista de la "carbono-neutralidad" a partir de un análisis situado de la producción de energía para la gran minería de cobre y, recientemente, también de litio en la ciudad de Tocopilla (norte de Chile). Al examinar las transformaciones sociales y materiales gatilladas por la producción de energía para la gran minería durante el siglo XX, este trabajo problematiza dicha neut…
Toxicité et invisibilisation. Nucléaire, rapports postcoloniaux et justice environnementale
Political Designs
La construction de deux reacteurs nucleaires en France en 1950, fait etat du developpement technologique qui reflete la politique, l'economie et la culture du pays
Making and Marketing Arms
Alternating Currents
Alternating Currents
808 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE safe” fission reactors is not examined, despite the fact that each of these sets of technologies has in place a historical record. Is there anything to be learned by contrasting these ongoing programs with previous efforts to augment energy choices? Implicitly, the book answers in the negative. Finally, the volume is all but silent about the role of science and technology in energy affairs. Other than a bri…
Effects of acute mental stress on serum lipids
The present study assessed the acute effects of mental stress (mental arithmetic) on serum cholesterol, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), and low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C), and the extent to which stress-induced changes are attributable to decreases in plasma volume. Total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL-C, and LDL-C were assessed in 18 healthy men (35 +/- 7 years) during a resting baseline (30 minutes), c…
Living with large-scale technology
Political Designs
La construction de deux reacteurs nucleaires en France en 1950, fait etat du developpement technologique qui reflete la politique, l'economie et la culture du pays
Rebels and Pioneers
This paper compares the cultural meanings of `work' and `risk' at two French nuclear sites, run by different institutions in the 1950s and 1960s. Differences between the two sites stemmed not from technological constraints, but from differences in the political, social and cultural ideologies espoused by each institution. Responses to risk, for example, were as much responses to larger ideological constructs as they were responses to danger. Thro…
Enacting Cultural Identity
On 16 October 1969, Marcel Boiteux, the president of Electricite de France (EDF), visited his company's Saint-Laurent nuclear site. He announced that the national electric utility would stop building the gas-graphite reactors which had until then constituted the core of France's nuclear programme and served as one of the most prominent technological embodiments of French national grandeur. The very next day, in a dramatic coincidence of time and …
Peasants, Engineers, and Atomic Cathedrals
Since the end of World War II, technological prowess has proved a dominant theme in French political and cultural discourse about national identity and grandeur.' Postwar technocratic planners portrayed technological development as the ultimate embodiment of Frenchness and saw state-driven modernization as a means to unify, even homogenize, the French nation.2 More recently, the excitement surrounding feats such as the force de frappe, the Concor…
Modernity and National Identity in Postwar France
The Radiance of France
Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age
Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age
This paper explores two places usually left off nuclear maps: Madagascar and Gabon, where the French mined and processed uranium ore, starting in the 1950s. It analyses how the ‘rupture-talks’ of nuclearity and decolonization became intertwined, first by examining the production of these rupture-talks by French expatriates, then by exploring how sociotechnical practices at each site both belied and performed claims to rupture for Malagasy and Gab…
Globalization meets frankenstein? Reflections on terrorism, nuclearity, and global technopolitical discourse
Post 9/11 discourse has important origins in Cold War technopolitical hierarchies that equated "nuclear" with colonizing nations and "non-nuclear" with colonized peoples. This paper gives examples of such equations in order to illuminate the place of nuclearity in current global technopolitics
Controversial Project Siting
Nuclear Ontologies
Negotiating Global Nuclearities
Throughout most of its history, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been portrayed as a technical agency in which geopolitics are either extraneous or inappropriate. This chapter argues that this separation of technology and politics was discursive and never enacted in practice. Looking at the role of South Africa in the early history of the agency, this chapter shows that the IAEA's technopolitical regime was the continually contes…
A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things
What things make a state "nuclear," what makes things "nuclear," and how do we know? The degree to which—and purpose for which—a nation, a program, a technology, or a material counts as "nuclear" is not always a matter of consensus. Nuclearity depends on history and geography, science and technology, bodies and politics, radiation and race, states and capitalism. It is not so much an essential property of things, as it is distributed in things. S…
The Radiance of France
How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. In the aftermath of World War II, as France sought a distinctive role for itself in the modern, postcolonial world, the nation and its leaders enthusiastically embraced large technological projects in general and nuclear power in particular. The Radiance of France asks how it happened t…
Africa and the Nuclear World
What is Africa's place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any 'nuclear activities.' Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were 'exposed to higher amounts of internal radia…
Hopes for the Radiated Body
This article explores the transnational politics of technology and science at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia. During the 1980s, Rössing workers refashioned surveillance technologies into methods for trade union action. When national independence in 1990 failed to produce radical ruptures in the workplace, union leaders engaged in technopolitical strategies of extraversion, and became knowledge producers about their own exposure to workplace …
History and the Technopolitics of Identity
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for West…
The Power of Nuclear Things
This essay explores three historical genealogies of U.S. President George W. Bush's infamous 2003 claim that Saddam Hussein sought "uranium from Africa" to fuel nuclear weapons. First, it considers the problem of when uranium counts as a "nuclear" thing, when it doesn't, and what Africa has to do with it. Second, it explores how Niger's politics, priorities, and conflicts have shaped the production and distribution of its uranium. Third, it exami…
AHR Conversation
The Work of Invisibility
This article explores the technopolitical mechanisms by which radiation hazards in South African uranium production were rendered invisible. The occupational health effects of underground uranium mining were deeply contested for decades, all over the world. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the volatile nature of labor relations under apartheid shaped how the South African mining industry responded to the presence of radon gas. With occasional help fr…
Political science (25 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (10 works) · Economics (6 works) · Engineering (6 works) · French Historical and Cultural Studies (6 works) · History (6 works)