Sentient Ecologies

Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization

Sentient Ecologies

Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization

Unsettling Taiwan’s Settler Narratives: A Decolonial Analysis of Museums as Sites of Political Redress for Indigenous Taiwan

This paper utilizes a decolonial lens coupled with qualitative critical discourse analysis to examine the capacity for political redress for Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples within Taipei’s museums. Recognizing the multiple layers of colonial encounters, of settler colonialism, external imperial regimes and contemporary neo-colonial threats – it analyses how the island chooses to portray its complex history in museums regarding Austronesian identity. Examining Indigenous representation within the context of Taiwan’s semi-sovereign reality, this paper emphasizes how settler narratives in museums continue to reduce and appropriate Indigeneity to legitimize the ROC distinct national identity as a multi-cultural liberal democracy. Understanding the colonial and nationalistic underpinnings of Taiwan’s museums, I argue that while a comprehensive decolonizing would require deeper interrogation – there is room for a radical imagining of what a museum of Indigenous redress could like in contemporary Taiwan

Computing the (Un)computable: A Computationally-Augmented Perspective on the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy

Computational methods have been used with increasing frequency in the social sciences and humanities, due to the availability of digital sources and computing power to study everything from changes in the meanings of words in Latin texts to how knowledge was categorized in eighteen century encyclopedias. Recent trends in the fields of digital humanities and computational social science include statistical methods like machine learning, requiring large pre-tagged and annotated sets of documents which in turn necessitates a great deal of prior work to create data to use with such methods. This reliance on large corpora of annotated data limits the questions and topics one can investigate to those for which such resources already exist or where significant effort is available to make such annotations. With unannotated corpora, such as what one can gather from the internet automatically using web scraping, a significantly wider range of topics are able to be addressed with computational methods. Such data can be unstructured or semi-structured, like newspaper articles, movie reviews, or tweets. While the unannotated nature of the data does somewhat limit the methods of analyzing the data, a data augmented approach to history using unannotated corpora is still useful. In this thesis, I study the utility of term frequency analysis and sentiment analysis methods to determine how useful these methods are as an aid to historical analysis. In particular, I am using these methods to understand and analyze changes in discourse one particular historical issue over time

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity. Chapters in the volume address cultural memory and heritage from six global perspectives and contexts: first, the relationship between cultural memory and heritage; second, the effect of urban development and large infrastructure on heritage; third, the destruction of indigenous heritage; fourth, the destruction of heritage in relation to erasing memory during sectarian violence and conflict; fifth, the impact of policymaking on cultural heritage assets; and sixth, a broad reflection on the destruction, change and transformation of heritage in an epilogue by Cornelius Holtorf, archaeologist and Chair of Heritage Futures at UNESCO

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage: Construction, Transformation and Destruction

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity. Chapters in the volume address cultural memory and heritage from six global perspectives and contexts: first, the relationship between cultural memory and heritage; second, the effect of urban development and large infrastructure on heritage; third, the destruction of indigenous heritage; fourth, the destruction of heritage in relation to erasing memory during sectarian violence and conflict; fifth, the impact of policymaking on cultural heritage assets; and sixth, a broad reflection on the destruction, change and transformation of heritage in an epilogue by Cornelius Holtorf, archaeologist and Chair of Heritage Futures at UNESCO. The range of sites discussed in the volume – from Australia, Brazil and Syria, to Bosnia, the UK and Taiwan – make it essential reading for researchers in Museum and Heritage Studies, Archaeology and History seeking a global, comprehensive study of cultural memory and heritage

The Rise of Asian Lions

In the post-WWII era, industrialized global aid powers defined and codified development initiatives through the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). However, the late 20th and early 21st centuries witnessed a shift in the global balance of power toward the Indo-Pacific region with the rise of Asian powers. In 1989, Japan emerged as a leader among established OECD-DAC nations and asserted a unique development philosophy in addressing African development issues. In the 21st century, the growth in foreign development diplomacy by South-South partners, most notably the People’s Republic of China (PRC, China) and India, has challenged the material and ontological foundations of “aid” and development. This thesis leverages a realist-constructivist framework to analyze the characteristics of Japan, China, and India’s strategic engagement in Africa as a new form of development power. The analysis reveals how the development narratives of Asian powers have disrupted the established norms and principles of OECD-DAC donorrecipient relationships, development archetypes, and core values. The three Asian donors cultivate unique portfolios of ontological, material, and soft power paradigms that are reshaping established 20th century OECD-DAC aid constructs. Distinct from 20th century constructs, this new mode of development cooperation is bolstered by the cultivation of a shared historical context and social values that bind African states and peoples with Asian brands. In an era of shifting global power, Japan, China, and India have forged an alternative mechanism to engage with and shape the international order via development cooperation. Engagement with Africa’s 54 diverse nations, regional blocs, and the African Union offers established and emerging Asian donor powers a mechanism to define the international order on their own terms. An in-depth analysis of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian development fora in Africa, reveals how each Asian donor cultivates a unique development brand engineered for a highly interconnected 21st century development landscape. Through the application of disruptive development ontologies in African engagement, Japan, China, and India have defined new modes of cooperation built around their distinctive worldviews, values, and norms.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 202

Chinese Territorial Assemblages & The Politics Of Spatial Governance

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Eating a nuclear disaster: A vital institutional ethnography of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster

This project explores the coordination of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. With the onset of the nuclear disaster in March 2011, imperceptible radionuclides re-emerged as objects of concern for many people living throughout the archipelago of Japan. Falling over homes, farmlands, forests, waterways and oceans, TEPCO’s radionuclides became unwelcomed actors within Japan’s agrifood assemblage, challenging the governance of food safety in Japan and around the world. To ensure the ‘safety’ of food circulating within its agrifood assemblage, the Japanese government initiated an effort to coordinate the activities of human actors in the turbulence of the radiological overflow. Beginning with the troubling experiences of konran (disorder) shared by forty-three people living and eating in Japan’s Kansai region in 2016, this thesis borrows sensibilities from the field of institutional ethnography to explore how everyday eating is hooked up within textually-mediated ruling relations that have emerged since the onset of TEPCO’s nuclear disaster. At the same time, sensibilities form material semiotics are used to attend to myriad other sociomaterial entanglements people find themselves entwined within in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, particularly their entanglements with imperceptible radionuclides. I refer to this method of inquiry as a ‘vital institutional ethnography.’ With the goal of producing knowledge that will be of use to my participants in situating their own experiences of konran within greater ruling relations, I follow strings from their experiences into various institutional complexes to both explicate ruling relations and explore the monstrous and ghostly sociomaterial entanglements of humans and more-than-humans they relate with in their everyday lives. Beginning with an exploration of historical cases of industrial ruination and the current case of TEPCO’s nuclear disaster, I discover that ruling texts and discourses are enacted in ways to erase or obfuscate the material presence of industrial pollutants. Through explicating the various ruling relations my participants are embedded and participate within following TEPCO’s nuclear disaster, I argue that the Japanese government’s coordination effort attempts to establish a single, ‘correct’ way for humans to understand and relate with radionuclides possibly present in the food and water they ingest. This ‘single reality’ is born out of what I refer to as the ‘transnational nuclear assemblage’—an assemblage of commissions, governments, committees, scientific associations and many other organizations which produce ruling texts that are designed to manage and contain radiological overflows within a vast and ever-expanding textual complex. In exploring the ruling relations involved in the enactment of ‘safe food,’ I discover that while single-reality-wielding coordination efforts may be efficient for maintaining the pace of commerce and in paving the textual-path forward for military and industrial projects, tensions arise when they enter and interfere with the messy, multiple realities of my locally-situated participants