Asia Institute - Theses
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ItemResilience in a different voice( 2022)What does it mean to stay resilient while also move forward resiliently in the “slow” nuclear disaster recovery? What happens if the means to remain resilient becomes undermined by the very ideas and practices done in the name of resilience? How can resilience be reimagined? In this thesis, I examine how the contested notion of resilience is shaped by civil society practice in disaster recovery context. Existing scholarship on the role of civil society in resilience-building tends to offer either instrumentalist evaluations assessing how civil society mobilizes resources to support the disaster-affected community or deconstructionist critiques uncovering how civil society facilitates resilience as a form of neoliberal governmentality. Offering a different voice to the debate, I demonstrate civil society practice as a site of contestation where the notion of resilience becomes critically reflected and creatively acted upon. From 2017 to 2021, I became a volunteer with SWK, a charity association based in Cairns, Australia, that acts alongside the children of Fukushima affected by “3.11” or the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and the subsequent nuclear accident in Fukushima on March 11, 2011. Adopting an Action Research approach, I engaged in a collaborative inquiry to explore the different meanings and possibilities for action to create a place where children can be free from unwanted disaster-induced radiation concerns. On the one hand, I illuminate a paradoxical process of resilience in which the need for a place where children can be free from radiation concerns is being sustained, not merely by the diffusion of radionuclides as a result of the nuclear accident, but also by the very interventions done in the name of “building back better.” On the other hand, I shed light onto the grassroots resilience that reimagines how resilience can be done differently. I highlight the continuous (re)making of translocal relations (tsunagari) that center the concerns and hopes voiced by the children of Fukushima to explore more liveable, different futures —including nuclear-free future. I argue that, despite appealing to more peaceful and sustainable future, resilience thinking rooted in neoliberal environmentalism that preserves the sociotechnical imaginary of nuclear power is unsustainable, alienating and forecloses the capacity to pursue “better” futures. I call for a rethinking of resilience notion through a care perspective that places the flourishing of children and the planetary wellbeing at the heart of disaster resilience research, policies and practice.
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ItemA culture of effort: Social poetics and the transnational parkour community( 2021)How do our embodied experiences affect the choices we make, and the actions we take, within our communities? How do our emotional narratives help us to produce social interventions through creative collaboration? What story do we tell about our values with our actions? Parkour training fosters a culture of effort, integrity, and altruism. This research is an exploration of parkour vision and expressions of embodied learning in the transnational parkour community. Foregrounding the experiences of practitioners in Melbourne, Edinburgh, and Tokyo, I explore notions of play, embodiment, and emotion in considering our relationship to our environment. These embodied experiences are often expressed through in-the-moment, of-the-moment responses to challenges which characterize the experience of training. Through the intimacy of participant observation and utilizing social poetics as a tool, I explore how these experiences offer insight into the relationship between values and action. Further, the dynamic between a parkour practitioner, their environment, and the challenge of training is a glimpse into how these relationships and experiences relate to creating social interventions in a wider cultural context. The final focus of this research is in creating an intervention to engage directly with the challenge of misrepresentation facing the transnational parkour community. Utilizing both the constellation of narratives in a qualitative ethnography, and the principles of applied visual anthropology, I facilitate a collaboration using an action-oriented research strategy to engage directly with this challenge. Throughout, I critically examine the nature of embodied research through my experiences in the field, and in reflection consider how my role as a researcher affects the community. The central focus of this research is on the embodied experience of parkour culture as it is changing. The pulse and texture of deep embodied experiences reveal broader cultural and social narratives written on the lives of individuals, and the strength, flexibility, and creativity needed for change.