For a full October week, 15 PhD students from 7 different countries and many different disciplines gathered in Norrköping, Sweden, for an intense PhD Autumn School on the theme of Nuclear Natures. Together with teachers from the Nuclear Natures project team and from the Nuclear Memory project team, the Autumn School participants enjoyed insightful and thought-provoking contributions of three distinguished scholars: social anthropologist Petra Tjitske Kalshoven from Manchester University, historian of technology David E Nye from University of Southern Denmark, and curator and UmArts director Ele Carpenter from Umeå University.

During the first days of the Autumn School, the participants presented their own research projects, wrote a collective poem, imagined to be wolfs living in the future at a post-nuclear site, created a historical narrative through a board game logic, and designed an exhibit exploring nuclear colonial relations, in parallel to getting to know each other over shared meals and breaks – all taking place in the beautiful 1930s villa Wadströmska.

The latter part of the Autumn School was integrated with the Nuclear Natures conference (see separate blog post), and here the PhD students engaged with the perspectives presented by other scholars, they brilliantly introduced a session where all participants at the conference shared a personal nuclear object or photo, and they decisively enriched the final wrap-up of the conference by sharing their main takeaways from the week.

From the organizers’ perspective, the PhD Autumn School seems to have fulfilled our hopes of offering an inspiring and safe space for sharing and exploring together, for new questions to be raised, and new personal and academic connections to thrive.

Image credits: Martin Edström, Carlos Gonzalvo, Thomas Keating, and Sergiu Novac.