We are organizing a workshop in Japan (maybe Tokyo, but maybe in Sendai; Ishinomaki would be a good site, no?) for the end of June or early July, 2012. The tentative title is: Teaching the Crisis: Materials, Pedagogy and Research for 3.11. The goal is to bring those of us who are teaching on 3.11 together to share perspectives, approaches and methods. Those teaching abroad and those teaching here in Japan will of course have some different priorities and possibilities, so we thought it made sense to bring them together to sort out complementary trajectories that lead up to Tohoku and beyond.

Representation: Clearly, one question would be how we represent Tohoku's perspectives and voices, their pasts and present? How to teach and produce research that is relevant to their experiences and their futures? But also, what can we learn from Tohoku, as an example
(case?) of a 'natural' disaster situation, media maelstrom, political mobilization, artistic response as well a huge-scale relief project and finally, an attempt to rebuild, to transform.

Materials: How to best use the huge amounts of stuff, from white papers, to rebuilding plans, to town's Facebook pages, to nuclear manga, as well as mainstream media and social media in all languages, much of it collected includes Harvard's huge Japan Disaster Archive (www.jdarchive.org). Besides the Harvard Archives, check out the work of Lisa Onaga, et. al.
(http://teach311.wordpress.com).
This workshop should give people a chance to actually show how we all can use this great stuff to better effect.

Pedagogy: How to teach Tohoku's past in ways that allow us to understand the implications of these last 6 months and the next 6. How to contextualize 3.11 with past Japanese disasters (earthquakes, Minamata, etc), and with other recent disaster situations (Haiti, Sri Lanka, Katrina, Chernobyl, etc.) But also, how best to include in a curriculum the relief experiences of the many professors, grads and undergrads, and individual relief workers, from both inside Japan and outside (and this outsider contribution is particularly important here due to their numbers and prominence)?

More Interdisciplinary Research: How are we able to productively and sensitively create classroom learning that leads to new research, including fieldwork (because there is so much fieldwork to do) but also political, scientific and development-related research?
These differences in disciplinary approaches are maybe esp. exciting--if there were ever a time when the necessity of cross-disciplinary work was obvious, this would be it. (And I think that dialogue is already happening in and out of Japan, no?)

Non-academic involvement: 3.11 has generated large amount of industry, development, activist, and policy information that clearly falls outside of the "scholarly" (as narrowly defined) and yet could be important parts of a relevant curriculum. These are harder to find and thus better to share.

Seeing what others are doing would be hugely stimulating and productive.

Money: We will have some funding, but in organizing a workshop such as this one, money is always an issue so we hope that those in Japan can make it to Tokyo around that time, and the many from abroad who are often here for the early summer research trip will come on their own. If someone wants to throw some money at this sort of workshop, we could think about co-sponsoring...

So, those who are doing related teaching and research, please send me what you are doing. Although probably we cannot all present, we can find a way for us to share our materials and ideas. We will look for broad interdisciplinary and multi-sector participation, and a larger meeting of an array of perspectives and approaches.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

David Slater
Sophia U.

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David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Faculty of Liberal Arts
Sophia University, Tokyo