NSF Award for the STS Forum on Fukushima

Hi Everyone,

So we have good news to report. We were awarded the NSF proposal to convene the first full meeting of the Fukushima Forum. Cathryn Carson (UC Berkeley), Kim Fortun (Rensselaer), and myself are the principal investigators for this grant, and we will be moving soon to draft a call for papers for this event. While details are still to be worked out, we hope to provide free housing and some travel subsidies for the event. Attendance will be limited to around 30 people, with a program committee in charge of screening applications. As with all Fukushima Forum event, we hope to draw in a diverse community of scholars of all ranks, including graduate students. Given the subject matter, we hope that around half of the attendees will be folks from Japan, or those doing direct fieldwork in Japan.

You can view our NSF proposal via this link. Again, the overall idea of the STS Forum on Fukushima is to create an interdisciplinary, transnational research community surrounding the Fukushima nuclear accident and the integrally related disasters stemming from the East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Meanwhile in the coming month, two separate groups of scholars will be gathering in Copenhagen, one a workshop on “Historical and Contemporary Studies of Disasters,” co-sponsored by the Prometheans/Asia Network/Teach 3.11as part of the SHOT Annual Meeting (October 4-7), and the other a series of four sessions (plus hopefully a separate reception) at the 4S Annual Meeting (October 17-20). You can find a preliminary program for both events listed under Conferences at this website.

We are also about to open a “Virtual Conference,” similar to the 3.11 Virtual Conference we held back in March. This is the other major announcement. Please see the above note for details.

– Atsushi