Princeton University Library Author Talk: Ryo Morimoto "Nuclear Ghost"
"There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisōma." This is how one resident describes a mysterious experience following the 2011 nuclear fallout in coastal Fukushima. Investigating the nuclear ghost among the graying population, Ryo Morimoto encounters radiation’s shapeshifting effects.
Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, has written one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima in English, “Nuclear Ghost.” In conversation with physicist and co-director of Princeton’s Program in Science and Global Security, Zia Mian, Morimoto presents the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes and their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories for future generations.
Morimoto and Mian will also discuss Princeton's role in nuclear-related research and projects.
This special author talk is brought to you by Global Japan Lab, the Humanities Council, and Princeton University Library.
Attendees can purchase a copy of "Nuclear Ghost" at Labyrinth Books and have it signed by the author at the talk.
- Date:
- Tuesday, October 3, 2023
- Time:
- 4:30pm - 5:30pm
- Location:
- Firestone Library - A-6-F
- Audience:
- First-Year Graduate Students Friends of Princeton University Library Independent Scholar / Outside Researcher Member of the Public Princeton Alumni Princeton Faculty/Researcher Princeton Staff Princeton Student Student Friends of Princeton University Library
- Categories:
- Events
About the speakers
Ryo Morimoto is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University.
Morimoto is a first-generation student and scholar from Japan. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. Regionally centered on Japan, Morimoto’s research creates spaces, languages, and archives through which to think about nuclear things, along with other not immediately sensible contaminants, as part of what it means to live in the late industrial and post-fallout era. He grounds his work in a range of theoretical frameworks—including semiotic anthropology, anthropology of disaster, environmental anthropology, anthropology and the recent history of Japan, anthropology of science and technology, and digital humanities. Morimoto mobilizes them to explore the uses and applications of technologies in social processes whereby certain sensory-cognitive experiences are (im)materialized and to grapple with the techno-sensory politics that emerge in discourses concerning invisible things. His scholarship addresses the experiences of lay public to read situated perspectives against the archive of what has been rendered perceptible.
Since 2020, Morimoto facilitates an undergraduate-led project, Nuclear Princeton, which highlights the under-acknowledged impacts of Princeton’s nuclear science and engineering on Native lands, communities, and beyond. Nuclear Princeton produced a short animation, Titration, in 2022, which is currently being featured in multiple film festivals in countries such as France, Turkey, and the U.S. During 2022-24, the Nuclear Princeton team will work on a project, Atoms for Memory: Inter-Institutional Storytelling of Nuclear Science at Princeton, funded by the New Ideas in Social Sciences Innovation Fund Initiative by the Office of the Dean for Research.
Morimoto is an executive committee member of Princeton Global Japan Lab and a 2022-24 cohort member of the U.S-Japan Network for the Future at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation.
Zia Mian
Zia Mian is a physicist and co-director of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, part of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His research interests include reducing and eliminating the risks from nuclear weapons, preventing and ending nuclear crises, and ending production, use, and stockpiling of fissile materials.