Joseph Masco
Biographic Data
| ID | 85328 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph Masco |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph |
| FAMILY NAME | Masco |
| SIGNATURE | MASCO J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 406 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Conspiracy/Theory
The contributors to Conspiracy/Theory evaluate the relationship between critical theory and conspiracy theory as the basis for political thought, showing how people rely on conspiracy theory or critical theory to make sense of complex and confusing events and social crises
Response to Matthew Rhodes-Purdy and Rachel Navarre’s review of Conspiracy/Theory
Sovereignty Unhinged
Sovereignty Unhinged theorizes sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state. Rather than engaging with the geopolitical realities of the present, the contributors consider sovereignty from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures. In a series of ethnographic case studies ranging from the Americas to the Middle East to Sout…
The Artificial World
Shaking, Trembling, Rattling, Shouting
Shaking, Trembling, Rattling, Shouting
The Artificial World
Life Under Ground
Target Audience
The Six Extinctions
William Rankin. After the Map
How do we come to know where we are? Or, for that matter, how to get to where we want to be? The terms of location have changed dramatically over the past century due to technological innovation, cartographic standardization, and global infrastructures of communication, navigation, surveillance, and command and control military systems. The technologies of “location” are not simple. But for many today it is difficult to imagine a moment before th…
Boundless informant
This article considers how technological revolution in digital technologies is effecting scholarship, activism, and privacy in the United States. Examining the revelations of Edward Snowden about National Security Agency domestic programs, it considers the status of the security 'file' and the role of anthropology in engaging a world without privacy
Seeing Like a Rover
The Crisis in Crisis
In this essay I consider the current logics of crisis in American media cultures and politics. I argue that "crisis" has become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century, a means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of violence across militarism, economy, and the environment. Assessing nuclear danger and climate danger, I critique and theorize the current standing of existential crisis as a mode of poli…
The Age of Fallout
Nuclear pasts, nuclear futures; or, disarming through rebuilding
This essay considers how the nuclear revolution transferred American ideas about the future. Tracking the utopian/dystopian logics of the nuclear age from the Cold War to the War on Terror, it interrogates contemporary proposals to rebuild the US nuclear arsenal over the coming decades
Anthropology and the Security State
The Theater of Operations
Auditing the War on Terror
The End of Ends
This paper assesses the conceptual and technological negotiation of an absolute end. The idea of a total ending is sublime: it is located outside of language and powerful precisely because of its sheer incomprehensibility. Yet, through the 20th century the United States built large-scale technological systems capable of achieving an absolute end to civilization. This paper engages both the idea of an end, and the means to an end, informing US nuc…
Anthropological Intelligence
Sensitive but Unclassified
This essay tracks the conversion of the United States from a countercommunist to a counterterrorist state formation via an examination of the expanding logics of state secrecy. Starting with analysis of a new category of state information known as "sensitive but unclassified," the essay theorizes a secrecy/threat matrix as a core project of the national security state. In doing so, it assesses the ideological linkages between "weapons of mass des…
Understories
Engineering Ruins and Affect
Bad Weather
How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. …
The Crisis in Crisis
In this essay I consider the current logics of crisis in American media cultures and politics. I argue that "crisis" has become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century, a means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of violence across militarism, economy, and the environment. Assessing nuclear danger and climate danger, I critique and theorize the current standing of existential crisis as a mode of poli…
Survival Is Your Business
In this article, I interrogate the national cultural work performed by the mass circulation of images of a nuclear-bombed United States since 1945. It argues that the production of negative affect has become a central arena of nation-building in the nuclear age, and tracks the visual deployment of nuclear fear on film from the early Cold War project of civil defense through the "war on terror." It argues that the production and management of nega…
Mutant Ecologies
A political ecology of the nuclear age developed through a theorization of "mutation" interrogates the contemporary terms of radioactive nature in New Mexico. As an analytic, the value of "mutation" is its emphasis on multigenerational effects, enabling an assessment of biosocial transformations as, alternatively, injury, improvement, or noise. Cold War radiation experiments, the post-Cold War transformation of nuclear production sites into "wild…
Bad Weather
How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. …
Nuclear technoaesthetics
In this article I investigate the politics of nuclear weapons production by examining how weapons scientists have experienced the exploding bomb at the level of sense perception through three experimental regimes: underground testing (1945-62), aboveground testing (1963-92), and stockpile stewardship (1995-2010). I argue that, for weapons scientists, a diminishing sensory experience of the exploding bomb has, over time, allowed nuclear weapon res…
Anthropology and the Security State
Sensitive but Unclassified
This essay tracks the conversion of the United States from a countercommunist to a counterterrorist state formation via an examination of the expanding logics of state secrecy. Starting with analysis of a new category of state information known as "sensitive but unclassified," the essay theorizes a secrecy/threat matrix as a core project of the national security state. In doing so, it assesses the ideological linkages between "weapons of mass des…
Lie Detectors
The U.S. nuclear complex has always been haunted by the possibility of spies.At Los Alamos, some of these ghosts have names—Klaus Fuchs and Theo-dore Hall, for example—while others remain elusive, like the third Soviet agent long rumored to have worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.1 Since the end of the Cold War, however, espionage, like the U.S. nuclear arsenal itself, has seemingly receded in the American imagination, psychically …
The Age of Fallout
It Is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance
In the century since Franz Boas began his field work on the Northwest Coast, the Kwakwaka'wakw1 potlatch has proved irresistible to the anthropological imagination. It has been variously interpreted as an interest-bearing investment of property (Boas 1897), as a demonstration of a paranoid, megalomaniacal personality (Benedict 1934), as a substitution for warfare (Codere 1950), as a means of distributing food (Piddcocke 1965; Vayda 1961), as a ph…
The End of Ends
This paper assesses the conceptual and technological negotiation of an absolute end. The idea of a total ending is sublime: it is located outside of language and powerful precisely because of its sheer incomprehensibility. Yet, through the 20th century the United States built large-scale technological systems capable of achieving an absolute end to civilization. This paper engages both the idea of an end, and the means to an end, informing US nuc…
Boundless informant
This article considers how technological revolution in digital technologies is effecting scholarship, activism, and privacy in the United States. Examining the revelations of Edward Snowden about National Security Agency domestic programs, it considers the status of the security 'file' and the role of anthropology in engaging a world without privacy
The Billboard Campaign
Joseph Masco is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico
Histories of the Future
Nuclear pasts, nuclear futures; or, disarming through rebuilding
This essay considers how the nuclear revolution transferred American ideas about the future. Tracking the utopian/dystopian logics of the nuclear age from the Cold War to the War on Terror, it interrogates contemporary proposals to rebuild the US nuclear arsenal over the coming decades
Competitive Displays
Auditing the War on Terror
"Active Measures"; or, How a KGB Spymaster Made Good in Post-9/11 America
The Potlatch Papers
The Potlatch Papers:. Colonial Case History. Christopher Bracken. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.276 pp
It Is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance
In the century since Franz Boas began his field work on the Northwest Coast, the Kwakwaka'wakw1 potlatch has proved irresistible to the anthropological imagination. It has been variously interpreted as an interest-bearing investment of property (Boas 1897), as a demonstration of a paranoid, megalomaniacal personality (Benedict 1934), as a substitution for warfare (Codere 1950), as a means of distributing food (Piddcocke 1965; Vayda 1961), as a ph…
Competitive Displays
The Potlatch Papers
The Potlatch Papers:. Colonial Case History. Christopher Bracken. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.276 pp
Lie Detectors
The U.S. nuclear complex has always been haunted by the possibility of spies.At Los Alamos, some of these ghosts have names—Klaus Fuchs and Theo-dore Hall, for example—while others remain elusive, like the third Soviet agent long rumored to have worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.1 Since the end of the Cold War, however, espionage, like the U.S. nuclear arsenal itself, has seemingly receded in the American imagination, psychically …
Mutant Ecologies
A political ecology of the nuclear age developed through a theorization of "mutation" interrogates the contemporary terms of radioactive nature in New Mexico. As an analytic, the value of "mutation" is its emphasis on multigenerational effects, enabling an assessment of biosocial transformations as, alternatively, injury, improvement, or noise. Cold War radiation experiments, the post-Cold War transformation of nuclear production sites into "wild…
Nuclear technoaesthetics
In this article I investigate the politics of nuclear weapons production by examining how weapons scientists have experienced the exploding bomb at the level of sense perception through three experimental regimes: underground testing (1945-62), aboveground testing (1963-92), and stockpile stewardship (1995-2010). I argue that, for weapons scientists, a diminishing sensory experience of the exploding bomb has, over time, allowed nuclear weapon res…
"Active Measures"; or, How a KGB Spymaster Made Good in Post-9/11 America
Histories of the Future
The Billboard Campaign
Joseph Masco is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico
The Nuclear Borderlands
The Nuclear Borderlands explores the sociocultural fallout of twentieth-century America's premier technoscientific project--the atomic bomb. Joseph Masco offers the first anthropological study of the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project for the people that live in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb, and the majority of weapons in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, were designed. Masco examines how diverse gro…
Survival Is Your Business
In this article, I interrogate the national cultural work performed by the mass circulation of images of a nuclear-bombed United States since 1945. It argues that the production of negative affect has become a central arena of nation-building in the nuclear age, and tracks the visual deployment of nuclear fear on film from the early Cold War project of civil defense through the "war on terror." It argues that the production and management of nega…
Engineering Ruins and Affect
Bad Weather
How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. …
Alien Ocean
Sensitive but Unclassified
This essay tracks the conversion of the United States from a countercommunist to a counterterrorist state formation via an examination of the expanding logics of state secrecy. Starting with analysis of a new category of state information known as "sensitive but unclassified," the essay theorizes a secrecy/threat matrix as a core project of the national security state. In doing so, it assesses the ideological linkages between "weapons of mass des…
Understories
Anthropological Intelligence
The End of Ends
This paper assesses the conceptual and technological negotiation of an absolute end. The idea of a total ending is sublime: it is located outside of language and powerful precisely because of its sheer incomprehensibility. Yet, through the 20th century the United States built large-scale technological systems capable of achieving an absolute end to civilization. This paper engages both the idea of an end, and the means to an end, informing US nuc…
Auditing the War on Terror
The Theater of Operations
The Age of Fallout
Nuclear pasts, nuclear futures; or, disarming through rebuilding
This essay considers how the nuclear revolution transferred American ideas about the future. Tracking the utopian/dystopian logics of the nuclear age from the Cold War to the War on Terror, it interrogates contemporary proposals to rebuild the US nuclear arsenal over the coming decades
Anthropology and the Security State
Boundless informant
This article considers how technological revolution in digital technologies is effecting scholarship, activism, and privacy in the United States. Examining the revelations of Edward Snowden about National Security Agency domestic programs, it considers the status of the security 'file' and the role of anthropology in engaging a world without privacy
Seeing Like a Rover
Political science (21 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · History (13 works) · Law (11 works) · History (10 works) · Nuclear Issues and Defense (10 works) · Cold war (7 works)