000 02408nab a2200289 4500
003 OSt
005 20220909183949.0
007 cr aa aaaaa
008 220909b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100 _aRush-Cooper, Nick
_952693
245 _aNuclear landscape:
_btourism, embodiment and exposure in the Chernobyl Zone
260 _bsage
_c2020
300 _aVol 27, Issue 2, 2020 : (217-235 p.).
520 _aThis article recounts a day-trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the ruined town of Pripyat through a series of ethnographic vignettes from the point of view of a tour guide. This article offers an approach that begins with questions of embodiment, materiality and agency in order to research worldly forces, such as radiation, without reducing them to only matters of language and thought. In responding to these challenges of the radioactive landscape of the Chernobyl Zone and Pripyat, the article offers ‘exposure’ as a model of subjectification, applicable beyond radioactive landscapes, which is based upon passivity, vulnerability and a foundational relation-with worldly others which exceed our perceptual, representational and bodily capacities. I introduce the work of Merleau-Ponty as a key theorist behind landscape geographies. In particular, the rejection of dualism and distance is shown to be a vital starting point when understanding tourism and guiding in the radioactive landscape of the Zone. Through the crackling and chirruping of the Geiger counter, the halting, careful movements of visitors and my own uncertainties, I illustrate how radiation is first encountered as a bodily exposure; which is only ever apprehended after-the-fact and experienced as vulnerability. I argue that a more passive, vulnerable sense of embodiment is needed than phenomenology provides, for which I bring the work of Irigaray into conversation with recent post-phenomenological work in geography.
650 _aChernobyl,
_952694
650 _aembodiment,
_950456
650 _alandscape,
_947977
650 _aLuce Irigaray,
_952695
650 _aMaurice Merleau-Ponty,
_952696
650 _anuclear,
_952697
650 _apost-phenomenology,
_952698
650 _aradiation,
_952699
650 _atourism
_949452
773 0 _010528
_916510
_dSage publisher 2019 -
_tCultural geographies
856 _uhttps://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019876616
942 _2ddc
_cART
999 _c12947
_d12947