Clémence Maillochon

Clémence Maillochon is from a small village in the Yvelines, in France. She is a postdoctoral researcher in history at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale and her research focuses on nuclear testing and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. As part of OSPAPIK, Clémence will use a comparative approach to study nuclear waste trajectories in the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia and will question the role that this waste plays in the arts of Oceania.

During her PhD at the Université de Haute-Alsace, Clémence worked on a large number of archives at the Centre d’Expérimentation du Pacifique, some of which have been made available to the public since 2021. Her work led her to conduct fieldwork in the Hoggar (Algerian Sahara) and in French Polynesia, during which she collected testimonies from activists and nuclear workers. Her thesis, which she defended in 2023, is entitled “Les réseaux de militants contre les essais nucléaires français (1959 – 1996)”. Clémence also has a background in journalism and geopolitics.

Her most recent publications address transnational militant solidarities (“Customary paths toward denuclearization and decolonization: Mā’ohi and Kanak activists passing through lo Larzac “, Journal of Pacific History, special edition ‘The Nuclear Age in the Pacific’, March 2024), the influence of church networks in the anti-nuclear movement in Oceania (“Protestantisme et contestations des essais nucléaires : imbrications des militantismes dans des réseaux d’Églises transnationales’, Relation Internationales, n°194, August 2023), and the question of nuclear colonialism in the Sahara (Christopher R. Hill, Clémence Maillochon, “‘Stealing fire from heaven’: Odette du Puigaudeau and French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara”, International Review of Environmental History, Volume 9, Issue 2, 2023).