Dear all,

You are invited to zoom in for this public lecture as part of my Anthropology of Japan course at University of Colorado Boulder. Please register in advance!

Best,

Kate

Public lecture: Wed, Apr 12 

11:15am-12:05pm MT, on Zoom 

Register in advance: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuce6prTkiGtI3NXtK9kDvzWTp89W_JjR7 

 

Japan's Nuclear Waste and Disposable Futures 

Dr. ann-elise lewallen 

Across Asia, Indigenous relationships with ancestral land are shaped by environmental racism and neoliberal capitalism, but also by ancestral instructions to care for the land. Yet, Indigenous communities in Japan refuse to accept state-sponsored energy development projects on their land. Indigenous Ainu (Japan) engage in ancestral land relations to challenge these development projects as "sustainable" or "clean." In this talk we examine a proposal to discard forever waste (nuclear waste) in a 300-meter deep tunnel hollowed underneath an ancestral Ainu village. The waste dump proposal exposes how intersecting forces of settler extractivism and energy colonialism have routed energy infrastructures in settler Hokkaido. Looking toward the future, I argue that this proposal and the science that undergirds it hinge on what may be understood as "disposable futures," namely how energy development and energy futures presuppose a body of pollutable land, or a "sink," to absorb settler waste for eternity.      

For further information, email: kathryn.goldfarb@colorado.edu 

This event is free and open to the public 

Supported by the Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado Boulder 

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