About the event: Nuclear power in Eastern Europe has been framed in various ways depending on political context: as a uranium state-building project, a key element of international decarbonization efforts, a model for reducing energy dependence on Russia, and an environmental risk slated for phase-out. Yet, one crucial aspect remains overlooked: how gendered expertise has sustained Bulgaria’s nuclear industry for decades—and how it remains entangled with the social hierarchies shaping nuclear energy production.

This talk draws on ethnographic and historical research, along with footage from a film-in-progress, to explore the labor, expertise, and social lives of women working in nuclear spaces along the Danube River. It focuses on two key sites: the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant, which continues to expand, and the Belene Nuclear Power Plant, a stalled project since the end of socialism. As laboratory technicians, construction managers, and power plant engineers, these women navigated state socialist labor policies, shifting gender expectations, and the demands of both career and family. Their perspectives offer deeper insight not only into the evolving role of women’s expertise in the nuclear power industry but also into how human labor itself is being reconfigured in relation to aging nuclear infrastructures—whether left to decay or reimagined as part of the “green” energy transition.

About the speaker: Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and leads the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. Her published work includes articles in American Anthropologist (2021), American Ethnologist (2024), Cultural Anthropology (2024), Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (2018), and Public Culture (2023). Her forthcoming book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, will be published by Stanford University Press in July 2025.

Resnick’s scholarship has received multiple awards, including the 2022 American Anthropological Association GAD Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship, the 2023 Women’s Forum Article Prize from the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies, and the 2024 Association of Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Heldt Prize for the Best Article in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies. Her current research focuses on the environmental and social politics surrounding nuclear power development and decommissioning in Europe. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has received research support from the Wilson Center, the Council for European Studies, the School for Advanced Research, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.

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