Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce, although a little last minute, a workshop at Tokyo University, Komaba Campus this coming Friday, May 17th from 6pm.

Thinking Urban Space and the Social in Post-Fukushima Japan. Ramona Handel-Bajema (AmeriCares), Christophe Thouny (University of Tokyo), Ueno Toshiya (Wakō University), Yamamoto Tadahito (The Institute of Politics and Economics), Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (Waseda University) Friday, May 17th, 2013 at 6pm The University of Tokyo, Komaba / Bld. 18 / Collaboration Room 3 "Todos Somos Japon" has been the rallying call to relocalize the March 2011 catastrophe on a planetary urban scale. For the spectacular event has been in many ways a missed encounter with a planetary urban reality. 3.11 is analogically aligned with 9.11. It captures and freezes the event into a national trauma, a "post-" inaugurating a chronological rupture that really only reconfirms a subsumption into and subjection to neo-liberalism and war. Yet nobody is Fukushima, which still preserves its promise of resisting its complete capture by discourses of national identity and security. It has thus become necessary to discuss this event as both a global spectacle and a local situation. By addressing issues of the spectacular, the planetary and the social, in relation to current strategies of urban redevelopment and social life, this workshop aims at establishing an initial discursive framework from which to ask what has changed, and begin to think the event of Fukushima.
English and Japanese⎜Free Admission ⎜No Registration Required
Organized by Christophe Thouny email: ct843@nyu.edu

The workshop is open to the public. While each participant will make a short presentation and lead the ensuing discussion between the invited scholars, participation from the audience is welcomed.

Best regards,

Christophe Thouny