15-16 June 2017 | University of California, Irvine
A Symposium on Ecology and Japan
Film: Keijiro Suga, “Memory of Water, Memory of Land,” a 20-minute documentary about Minami Soma, Fukushima; Response: “On the Concept of Rewilding,” Dan O’Neill, UC Berkeley
Panel 1: Solids (Moderated by Eun Young Seong, EALL)
- Eiko Maruko Sinawer, “Wars against Garbage in 1970s Japan”
- David Fedman, “Japanese Forest Ecology in the Peninsular Laboratory”
- Shiho Satsuka, “Wild Mushrooms, Multispecies Temporality and the ‘New Commons’”
Panel 2: Liquids (Moderated by Sara Newsome, EALL)
- Jakobina Arch, “Humanizing Whales: Religion and the Human-Other Boundary in Early Modern Japan”
- Roderick Ike Wilson, “Water Worlds: Farmers, Fishers, and Riverboat Pilots in Early Modern Kanto”
- Robert Stolz, “The Difference Between a River and a Drain: Water, Pollution, and Capitalist Development in Modern Japan”
Panel 3: Air (Introductory Poem by Vanessa Baker, EALL)
A Round Table on the State of the Field: Ecological Studies & Japanese Studies
- Christine Marran, Author of Ecology Without Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Katsuya Hirano, Author of a 5-Interview Series with Anti-Nuclear Activists and Fukushima Intellectuals for Asia Pacific Journal Japan Focus (2015-2017)
- Julia Adeney Thomas, Author of The Historian’s Task in the Age of the Anthropocene (in process) and co-editor of Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013)
- Moderator: Margherita Long, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, UC Irvine, author of On Being Worthy of the Event: Thinking Force, Affect and Origin After 3.11 (in process)
Memorial: “Memory, Pedagogy, Materiality – On Ecocriticism and the Life of Kota Inoue,” James A. Fujii
With Generous Sponsorship From: Department East Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Research Budgets of Margherita Long and David Fedman, Postmodern Culture, International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), Institute for International, Global & Regional Studies (IIGaRS)
Organized by the Departments of History (David Fedman) and East Asian Languages and Literatures (Margherita Long & Susan Klein).
