A Critical Disaster Studies Approach to Japan: Research Directions

The social sciences have produced a considerable amount of studies on Japan’s disasters, with research output peaking in the aftermath of two major recent earthquakes: the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 and the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. However, the latest disaster events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, have reoriented disaster research to question critically the very idea of disaster as a single, isolated event. Such an epistemological shift urges to regard disasters as events bound up in the long-term embedded socio-political, historical, and economic processes and happening in a context of multi-hazard risks that cross temporal and spatial boundaries. Dr James Goltz’s presentation will frame the concept of borderless disasters, which requires are consideration of the temporal, spatial, phasing and positioning classifications to accommodate the full range of disasters to which our globalised world is vulnerable. Ms Jing Li’s research documents a reconstructive social innovation cycle driven by women evacuees of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident. By taking the 2011 triple disaster as a reference point in time, Dr Julia Gerster discusses social memory as a critical issue of the long-term human interaction with disasters, elucidating the way it enables human beings to containdisasters through an exercise of disambiguation and framing that reveals its socialconstruction beyond the time and space of the event. By adopting a critical disaster studies perspective with Japan as a case, this session will provide a framework for newer qualitative and theoretically oriented approaches to disaster.