Areas of Interest:

Anthropological Theories of Value, Environmental Anthropology and Anthropology of Disaster, Political Anthropology, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Multisensory Anthropology, Japan. 

Field Research Plans:

Tae is a PhD candidate working at the nexus of anthropological theories of value, anthropology of disaster, anthropology of science and technology, and political anthropology to understand the multiscalar dimensions of disaster recovery, their contrasting temporalities, and how these experiences are politically mobilized.

Her dissertation – tentatively titled Worlds Worth Rebuilding: Recovery, Future-Making, and Science as Soft Power in Post-Disaster Japan – focuses on the understandings and practices of scientists, policymakers, and residents of Arahama, Sendai City, Japan. Completely swept away by the 2011 tsunami, Arahama became the terrain where these groups developed and negotiated different ideas of worlds worth rebuilding: one synchronized with the deep time of megathrust earthquakes’ return period, or with the future simple of an increasingly aging population or the tomorrow of daily relationships with the environment and its sedimented meanings. Furthermore, this project explores how these highly localized processes of negotiating recovery became international guidelines crystallized in the United Nations’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Channeling a long history of Japan’s use of disaster science as a soft power tool, this research analyzes the country’s political efforts to present itself as an international problem-solver. 

Intertwining archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, photography, collaborative artistic creations, and a visiting researcher position at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science, at Tohoku University, Tae brings together multiple spatial, temporal, and expressive dimensions to understand how different values and futures are brought into being.