EVENT DETAILS

Of Soils, Roots, and Streams: A Symposium on Ecology and Japan

UC Irvine, 15-16 June 2017

Thursday, 15 June, Evening Session
135 Humanities Instructional Building (HIB), UCI, 92697

4:30 pm Shuttle from Hotel Irvine to HIB135 (gather in lobby)

5:00 pm Dinner for Speakers & Guests

6:45 pm Opening Remarks, Margherita Long

7:00 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 (HG), UCI, 92697

8:30 am Shuttle from Hotel Irvine to 1010 Humanities Gateway (lobby)

9:00 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 am 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 pm Lunch for Speakers & Guests in HG 1002

1:30 pm Walking Break: Ring Road, Middle Earth

Friday, 16 June, Afternoon Session
1010 Humanities Gateway

2-:00 pm 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)

Readings:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tbcljqkftf2ym9k/AAD7YVrgSLHTvPtZMEY83Cj-a?dl=0

4:15 pm Memorial: “Memory, Pedagogy, Materiality – On Ecocriticism and the Life of Kota Inoue,” James A. Fujii

4:45 pm Wine and Cheese

5:15 pm Film: “Human Error,” (2017) a 40-minute documentary about Fukushima evacuees and plant operators by Yoh Kawano

6:30 pm Closing Remarks

7:00 pm Dinner for Speakers & Guests at the home of Susan Klein

***

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). For more info contact margherita.long@uci.edu.