Date: Wednesday October 30, 2024

Time: 8:00-9:30 PM BJT / 8:00-9:30 AM EST

Zoom: 960 7584 7683

Speaker: Jieun Cho, Cultural Anthropologist and Postdoctoral Associate in Asian Climate and Environments, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute and Global Asia Initiative, Duke University

Abstract

Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the health of “Fukushima children” has become a problem for parents, post-nuclear politics, and future imaginaries in Japan. Who is responsible for caring for whom in a prolonged crisis? And what are the political and ethical implications of a reproductive futurism taking place around a child imperiled by radiation? Based on fieldwork with child-raising families from Fukushima between 2017 and 2020, this research investigates what conceptions of “life” are re/produced in the meltdown’s aftermath by investigating what I call “anxious care,” defined as the work of making children live within and against radiation as a condition of living. The talk particularly focuses on the long-term impact of (now terminated) post-disaster temporary housing on mother-child evacuees from the “gray zones” of the nuclear disaster—exposed to the fallout yet excluded from nuclear evacuation zones. By examining homemaking as a site of political struggle, it highlights how evacuee mothers contest the boundaries of nuclear damage and victimhood while navigating the intersections of emergency response, gendered precarity, and societal norms surrounding the ideas of “home.” I argue that the gender-specific harms of nuclear evacuation have been shaped by both the pre-disaster gendering of the family and the post-disaster dynamics of return-focused “hometown” recovery. The case of evacuee mothers exemplifies what I call the reproductive rift in my book project—whereby the very conditions of re/producing life are entangled with the environmental politics of survival, resilience, and justice. Ultimately, the talk calls for a critical reevaluation of the substantive role of reproductive activities in reconfiguring political futures in and beyond post-nuclear Japan.

Bio

Jieun Cho earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, specializing in gender, environment, and disaster. Her research, titled ‘Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan,’ investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Various stages of her work have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate School at Duke University. Since 2021, she has also been a Contributing Editor of the Society for East Asian Anthropology section of Anthropology News. Before joining academia, she worked in the IT and energy industries in Korea and Japan.

As a postdoctoral researcher, she seeks to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on social reproduction, toxic ecologies, and environmental futures from the perspective of post-Cold War East Asia.