Title:

Building Critical Capacities Through Environmental Injustice Case Study Research with Dr. Kim Fortun (UC Irvine, Anthropology Department)

Workshop description:

Addressing current and accelerating environmental injustice around the world will depend on students we are educating today. Students need to learn about many types of environmental hazards and how to quickly characterize the different contexts and communities impacted by them. They need experience working with different kinds of data and to develop sharp analytical skills (aware of the many ways data can be misused). They need to learn to collaborate, leveraging tools that allow them to connect with people in different places, with different perspectives. They need to become skilled and creative communicators, mindful of different kinds of audiences.

Cultivating this tangle of capabilities is the goal of my teaching (in an undergraduate course, "Environmental Injustice," and in a MS program formed after the Fukushima disaster to educate a new generation of radiation health experts) and of the recently launched Beyond Environmental Injustice Teaching Collective. Student case study research -- done individually or in research groups -- focused on diverse communities and the environmental hazards they face is at the center of the effort. In this presentation, I'll share the Environmental Injustice Case Study Framework and how we have mobilized it both in our classrooms and in the communities we study.

Tentative schedule:

10-10:05am: Introduction

10:05-10:45: First session

10:45-10:55: Q&A

10:55-11:00: Breaktime

11:00-11:35: Second session

11:35-11:45: Q&A

Speaker biography:

Kim Fortun is a Professor in the University of California Irvine's Department of Anthropology. Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, data practices and politics, and experimental ethnographic methods and research design. Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability.

Currently, she is working on an array of collaborative projects, including the Asthma Files, the Quotidian Anthropocene Project, and the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 Project, all supported by the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography. Fortun co-edits a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press, Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster, designed to connect academic research to public problems and policy, reaching audiences in different regions of the world. September 2017- 2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies.

Registration link: https://forms.gle/vwsGYXM84VjgkyHA6

Simultaneous interpretation (English to Japanese) available

Contact information: global.fd@adm.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp