Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture invites you to a panel

Journeys Along the Atomic Highway: History, Politics, Performance and Memoir

Monday April 20th
5:00-7:30
Room 508, Building 10
Sophia University Yotsuya Campus

Map link to campus:
http://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/info/access/directions/acce
ss_yotsuya

Map link to campus building:
http://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/info/access/map/map_yotsuya

Lecture in English / No RSVP required

PROGRAM

The Global Hibakusha Project and the Fukushima Disaster Robert Jacobs, Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University

>From Canada’s Great Bear Lake to Hiroshima and
Fukushima
Julie Salverson, Department of Drama, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Peter C. van Wyck, Communication and Media Studies, Concordia University in Montréal

ABSTRACTS

Jacobs will speak on the findings of the Global Hibakusha Project and their relevance for the people of Fukushima-ken. Having spent over five years doing historical assessments on the cultural, social and familial legacies of radiation exposures on communities around the world, primarily from nuclear weapon testing, Jacobs argues that there is a clear precedence in these communities to what has unfolded for the people of Fukushima. While many in positions of authority have spoken of wishing that things would go well for the people of Fukushima, history has shown exactly what was ahead for the people living in contaminated areas, and that much more proactive steps could have been, and still should be, taken. Jacobs will speak about the history of communities affected by radiation around the world.

Salverson and van Wyck will talk about their research and collaboration concerning the cultural, material and narrative histories of the atomic age. In particular they will speak about the long and complicated route – the highway of the atom, they call it – that connects a remote uranium mine on the shores of Canada's Great Bear Lake, the Dene whose home is that lake, the Manhattan Project, and the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a combination of scholarship, anecdote, opera performance and memoir, they will talk about their journey along this atomic highway.

BIOGRAPHIES

Robert (Bo) Jacobs is an Associate Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University in Hiroshima, Japan. He works on social and cultural aspects of nuclear technologies. He is the author of The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010), (also available in a Japanese translation published by Gaifusha in 2013), the editor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb (2010), the co-editor of Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West: The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media (forthcoming 2015), and also co-editor of the special issue of Critical Military Studies “Re-Imagining Hirsohima” due out in the summer of 2015. He has published widely on nuclear issues around the world.
Julie Salverson is a writer, scholar and community animator who has published plays, articles and essays about atomic culture, trauma, foolish witness, historical memory, ethics and the imagination. She is the librettist for Shelter, a cartoon chamber opera about the atomic bomb. She has worked extensively developing curriculum and arts work in professional/community partnerships and gives workshops and presentations using creative arts methods to share stories, analyze community issues and address difficult dynamics within groups and organizations. She is developing resilience training for frontline service providers, including The Attachment Association of Canada and War Horse Awareness Foundation in Alberta.
Julie is Associate Professor of Drama at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and Adjunct Professor at The Royal Military College of Canada. Her book Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir will be published in 2016 by Wolsak and Wynn, Canada. Website:
jsalverson.wordpress.com

Peter C. van Wyck is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Concordia University in Montréal. He is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer with an abiding interest in the theoretical and practical relations between culture, nature, environment, landscape, memory and waste. His most recent book, The Highway of the Atom (McGill-Queens University Press) – winner of the 2011 Gertrude J. Robinson book award from the Canadian Communication Association – is a theoretical and archival investigation tracing the origins of the atomic bomb in Canada’s North. In addition to a variety of articles, book chapters, critical reviews and creative texts, he is also author of Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (State University of New York Press, 1997). His current projects concern global nuclear repositories, atomic media and the Anthropocene, apology, justice and the future.

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