External publications

Stories of disaster as sites of mitigation: knowledge production and affective engagement in the narrativization of nuclear incidents in different media

Butler, Martin / Sina Farzin / Michael Fuchs / Anna-Katharina Hornidge / Uwe Schimank
External Publications (2025)

in: Minerva, first published 22.01.2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09565-9

This article explores how nuclear disaster narratives have both been informed by and articulated collective images of risk and uncertainty since the 1980s. Drawing on ideas from classical and affective narratology that are framed by a perspective informed by the sociology of knowledge, we examine three variations of narrating nuclear disasters in different media: (1) sociologist Charles Perrow’s detailed analysis of the Three Mile Island accident in his popular science book Normal Accidents(1984), (2) Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer (1997), a literary/journalistic account of the Chernobyl disaster that chronicles individuals’ experiences through eyewitness accounts, and (3) the television series Chernobyl (2019), which, in a docufictional style, combines what is staged as an objective reconstruction of the unfolding of the disaster with subjective memories of those affected while reflecting on the incident’s larger political, scientific, and environmental contexts. We suggest that these three stories of nuclear incidents not only produce specific knowledges about the disaster in question but also address the fragility of knowledge systems and social structures as well as assessments of agency. As such, these narratives function as sites of mitigation that offer their readers/viewers certainty in times of crisis.