Welcome, Mary Dickson: Fall 2024 Community Practitioner in Residence

 

Welcome, Mary Dickson: Fall 2024 Community Practitioner in Residence

This fall, we are grateful to have Mary Dickson join our program as the Community Practitioner in Residence. Mary will share her expertise as a downwinder activist and writer with our students to highlight the role environmental humanities can play in activism.

About Mary

Mary Dickson is an award-winning writer, downwinder, and thyroid cancer survivor from Salt Lake City, Utah. She is an internationally recognized advocate for survivors of nuclear weapons testing in the United States. Mary has written and spoken widely about the human toll of nuclear weapons testing at conferences, symposia, and forums across the U.S. and Japan, including twice at the World Forum of Survivors of Nuclear Weapons in Hiroshima. She also participated in the ICAN Nuclear Ban Week in Vienna, Austria, in 2022, in conjunction with the First Meeting of the States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Recently, Mary lectured and participated in panels and seminars as a guest educator with the Japanese NGO Peaceboat on a global “Voyage for a Nuclear-Free World” from New York to South and Central America and Mexico.

After a 30-year career in public broadcasting, Mary retired in 2017 but continues to host Contact with Mary Dickson weeknights on PBS Utah. She has also taught in the University of Utah Honors Program and was named a Quintus C. Wilson Distinguished Alumnus at the University.

For the past four years, Mary has worked with a consortium of downwinders in the western U.S. and a coalition of national NGOs to advance legislation in the U.S. Congress that expands compensation for U.S. victims of nuclear weapons testing and production. She has lobbied members of Congress and spoken at press conferences with bill sponsors at the U.S. Capitol.

Mary has been featured in various media outlets and documentaries about the exposure of U.S. citizens to radioactive fallout, such as Downwinders and the Radioactive West, Silent Fallout, Downwind, The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout, 928: The Threat Continues, and others.

Her play, Exposed, which chronicles her story, opened to critical acclaim when it premiered in 2007 and has since been produced as a staged reading across the country. In 2012, she was recognized by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability for her lifelong dedication to achieving justice for nuclear testing downwinders and advocating for a nuclear-free world.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, Environmental Humanities invites a practitioner-in-residence to the University each semester to use the tools of the humanities and culture to further environmental and climate justice. Read more about our practitioners-in-residence on our blog.