Dear all,

You are invited to join a public lecture through my Anthropology of Japan class, by Dr. Chika Watanabe on Wednesday, April 19. Please register in advance!

Kate

 

 

Public lecture: Wed, Apr 19
11:15am-12:05pm MT, on Zoom 
Register in advance: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0uc-yurDsuE90i8eVG4MMX51r9uhTzyfeZ 

 

Interrogating Households in Anticipation of Disasters: The Feminization of Preparedness in Japan 
Dr. Chika Watanabe, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, The University of Manchester

It is now a maxim that disaster preparedness needs to involve community-based approaches in order to be effective. These include not only neighbourhood-level strategies but also those involving households. But what is a "household" in the first place in disaster preparedness initiatives? This talk explores how particular notions of the household are produced through household-based disaster preparedness policies and activities in Japan. The questions driving the paper emerge from a transnational ethnographic research project that has looked at preparedness activities with children, their schools, and their families in Japan and Chile. The paper suggests that household preparedness efforts mobilize a gendered understanding of the household, a phenomenon entailing "the feminization of preparedness." Ultimately, as much as anthropologists and others have challenged essentialized and stable definitions of "community" in disaster research, we must do the same for "the household." 

 

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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Kathryn E. Goldfarb
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Colorado at Boulder
1350 Pleasant St.
Boulder, CO 80309
Hale Science 350 | Campus Box 233 UCB
Office: Hale Science 466
Office phone: 303.492.1589
kathryn.goldfarb@colorado.edu