[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, September 24 - Shi-Lin Loh and Kyoko Sato (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Shi-Lin Loh and Kyoko Sato
Harvard, EALC/Stanford STS

on
Narrating Fukushima: Scales of a Nuclear Meltdown.
Monday, September 24
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Thursday, September 20.

Abstract: The nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima in the spring of 2011, according to countless media and government analyses, were a failure of Japan: collusive ties between regulators and industry prevented proper enforcement, the nation’s nuclear engineers embodied a culture of hubris, and the state prevented the media from raising critical perspectives. This analysis is usefully understood as a narrative. Like all narratives, it reveals certain issues and masks others. One of the limitations of the “failure of Japan” narrative is that its national focus ignores causes and consequences at local and international scales. In this article, we offer a broader view of the Fukushima nuclear disaster by presenting a series of alternative narratives that draw out local, national, and international dimensions of this nuclear disaster. Casting our gaze beyond the dominant narrative allows us to direct attention to actors and issues often overlooked, such as Cold War politics, international flows of knowledge and materials, global consumers, nation-building, villagers in Okuma and Futaba, and laborers at the Fukushima plant. In particular, we highlight several significant ways in which narratives at different scales intersect, overlap, and reinforce each other. To make sense of the complex forces that brought about the nuclear meltdowns and myriad impacts they will have, we need more stories, not less.

Biography: Shi-Lin Loh is a PhD candidate in the joint program between the department of History and the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She specializes in modern (nineteenth and twentieth-century) Japanese and Chinese history, with a particular interest in commemorations and contestations of the Asia-Pacific War in both societies. She is currently working on a dissertation prospectus about the cultural impact of nuclear science in Japan both before and after Hiroshima.

Dr. Kyoko Sato is the Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University. Her research explores how cultural meanings, politics, and institutional frameworks intersect in the development of technology and knowledge production. She is currently completing a book manuscript,The Making of Genetically Modified Food: Culture, Politics and Policy in France, Japan and the United States, and conducting a study that examines cultural politics of nuclear energy before and after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and the United States. She is also part of the research project on the workings of interdisciplinary collaboration in high-status research networks (with Michèle Lamont and Veronica Boix-Mansilla at Harvard). Dr. Sato received her PhD in sociology from Princeton University, MA in journalism from New York University, and BA in English from the University of Tokyo. She was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University and a lecturer at Harvard.




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http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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