Olga Kuchinskaya
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
PhD, University of California, San Diego
1129 Cathedral of Learning
Phone: 412-624-6788
E-mail: okuchins@pitt.edu
Olga received her PhD in 2007 from the University of California – San Diego. She served as a managing editor for Science, Technology, & Human Values (journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science) in 2007-08 and held a UC Faculty Fellow position in 2008-09.
Olga is completing a research project that examines how we know what we know about the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, the largest nuclear accident to date. The analysis describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl health effects: practices that displace radiation and its health effects as an object of public attention and scientific research, and make them unobservable. The analysis is based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in Belarus, one of the former Soviet Union republics, which was covered with most of the Chernobyl fallout.
Olga is also interested in the production of knowledge and ignorance about other environmental hazards, especially imperceptible hazards that require scientific expertise and tools to be established as hazards in the first place.
Areas of Research and Teaching Interests
Communication—science communication; communication and new media technologies; communication and the environment
Science and Technology Studies/Rhetorics of Science— public engagement with science; lay and expert knowledges; scientific uncertainty; social construction of ignorance
Gender Studies—gender, science, and technology
Research Methods—qualitative methods of research; grounded theory
Undergraduate Courses Taught
- Rhetoric of Science (COMMRC 1147)
- Special Topics in Mass Communication:
Media & Global Nature/Culture (COMMRC 1732) - Special Topics in Mass Communication:
Communication and New Media Technologies (COMMRC 1732)
