Biography
Hiroko Kumaki is a sociocultural anthropologist focusing on environmental health and environmental remediation. Her research engages ethnographies and social theories of health, environment, and science and technology to ask what it means to live well in the context of profound environmental crises.
Kumaki鈥檚 first book project, Becoming F奴kei: Living Well in a Relational Landscape after Fukushima, examines regulatory policies and everyday practices of health and well-being after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011. She contrasts regulatory policies and advocacy work that engage the land through the logic of 鈥渞easonable exposure,鈥 with the relational landscape (蹿奴办别颈) that residents in the former evacuation zone were creating through the act of planting seeds and harvesting from their exposed land. She proposes to 鈥渟uspend nuclearity鈥 in studies of nuclear sites, and argues that it was not only the divergent understandings and relationships with radiation, but also differing approaches to the exposed land that made health and well-being a highly contested issue after the nuclear fallout.
Her second book project, Environ-Mental Health: Scaling Environmental Change in Healthcare, investigates how environmental change has been scaled and negotiated in disaster response. The project focuses on Kokoro no Kea, or mental healthcare, that has become a common response to disasters in Japan. In a time when mental health is becoming an integral response to climate change and environmental toxicity, this project examines how health and well-being for humans and the environment are negotiated at the intersection of environmental change and mental health.
Kumaki is also in the early stages of another monograph project that examines Innovation as a Method of Remediation. In Fukushima, the environmental and public health catastrophe has been politically transformed into an opportunity for technological innovation. As ethnographic methods have become increasingly mobilized as a source of innovation, for instance in human centered design, Kumaki examines the histories and socioecological implications of 鈥渋nnovation,鈥 and thereby ethnography, as a method of social and environmental remediation.
Prior to 91直播, Kumaki was a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She earned a PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago, an MA in East Asian studies at Yale University, and a BA in anthropology at Harvard University.
