Hiroko Kumaki

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’s first book project, Becoming Fūkei: 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 “reasonable exposure,” with the relational landscape (fūkei) that residents in the former evacuation zone were creating through the act of planting seeds and harvesting from their exposed land. She proposes to “suspend nuclearity” 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 “innovation,” and thereby ethnography, as a method of social and environmental remediation.

Prior to Oberlin, 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.