Research Areas

Social and Cultural History of the Nuclear Age, History of Science and Technology, Environmental History, and Memory Studies

Karena started her research on Chernobyl in 2008. As a scholar at the École Normale Supérieure Paris, she wrote her master's thesis about the 'French debate on the impact of Chernobyl'; the thesis was later published as a book in 2011 under the title 'Tschernobyl und Frankreich' ('Chernobyl and France'). Currently, as her PhD dissertation, Karena continues her work on Chernobyl and is conducting a comparative study on the debates concerning the health impact of Chernobyl in France, Great Britain and Italy. Her research deals with the question of how national nuclear politics have influenced the debate on the health effects of the accident in the respective countries (and vice versa) and how the commemoration of the accident has been used to underpin political arguments. At the same time, the comparative perspective applied sheds light on the importance of underlying structures such as national nuclear politics, elite and expert culture, environmentalism, as well as on the role of individual agency. These factors condition the emergence of a specific narrative of the accident within a specific discursive field, and furthermore, determine the meaning which is attributed to 'Chernobyl'. Karena pays special attention to the anniversaries of the accident in 1996 and 2006 because of the political implications that are tied to the commemoration of Chernobyl. For her, the case of Chernobyl is of particular significance as the question ‘What was (or is) Chernobyl?’ directly impacts current questions regarding (nuclear) energy and environmental policies.