Dear all,

You are invited to join the last public lecture of the semester through my Anthropology of Japan class at CU Boulder. It's a double-header! Please register in advance.

Best,

Kate

Public lecture: Mon, Apr 29, 2024

12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom

Register in advance:

Registration: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcpfuisqjkqHtxM6cCfZSOgc-RRe1lLKPxM

 

Disaster Mental Health and the "Social" in Neoliberal Japan

Dr. Hiroko Kumaki

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Oberlin College

 

Since the Kobe Earthquake, disaster mental healthcare in Japan has identified the sociality of disaster survivors as its main locus of intervention. Ethnography of disaster mental healthcare activities after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster response shows that while bureaucratic imperatives focus on increasing physical contact to keep the statistics of socially isolated deaths at bay, mental healthcare providers cultivated places of belonging for survivors grounded in affective, reciprocal, and place-based sociality. The dwindling of the "social" has been highlighted in neoliberal Japan. However, "social" is very much alive, albeit in unexpected places and forms.

 

and

 

Upending 3.11 memorialization and monumentalization

Dr. Jun Mizukawa

Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lake Forest College

 

After numerous building structures located on the northeast coast succumbed to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (hereafter 3.11), some were preserved for future disaster-prevention and -mitigation purposes under the designation of 'earthquake disaster remains' (shinsai ikō). By drawing attention to an atypical 'earthquake disaster remains,' this talk explores what it means to memorialize and monumentalize the event of 3.11 for future generations.