Of Soils, Roots, and Streams: A Symposium on Ecology of Japan
Department: East Asian Studies
Date and Time: June 16, 2017 | 9:00 AM-7:00 PMEvent Location: HG 1010
Event Details
Of Soils, Roots, and Streams: A Symposium on Ecology and Japan
UC Irvine, 15-16 June 2017
Thursday 15 June Evening Session: University Hills
5 pm Dinner for Speakers, at the home of David Fedman
7 pm 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
Friday 16 June Morning Session: 1010 Humanities Gateway
9 am 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’”
10:45 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”
12:30 Lunch for Speakers
1:30 Walking Break: Ring Road, Middle Earth
Friday 16 June Afternoon Session: 1010 Humanities Gateway
2-4 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 Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (California, 2002) and The Historian’s Task in the Age of the Anthropocene (in process). 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)
Readings: Available by Dropbox; email margherita.long@uci.edu
4:15 Memorial: “Memory, Pedagogy, Materiality – On Ecocriticism and the Life of Kota Inoue,” James A. Fujii
4:45 Wine and Cheese
5:15 Film: “Human Error,” (2017) a 40-minute documentary about Fukushima evacuees and plant operators by Yoh Kawano
7:00 Dinner for Speakers, at the home of Susan Klein
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With Generous Sponsorship From: Department East Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Research Budgets of Margherita Long and David Fedman, Postmodern Culture, Center for Asian Studies, International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), Humanities Commons, and the 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). For more info contact margherita.long@uci.edu.