FUKUNAGA Mayumi

Environmental sociology, environmental ethics. Though my research field was supposed to be Iwate, the Seto Inland Sea and North America, the course of my research has in fact been led by the movements of salmonids. Pursuing salmon and trout reveals how living things engage in gradual ‘cyborgification’, (re)synthesize their genetic structure along with their surrounding environments, and even cease to be living things at all, in such a way that my hobby of science fiction has become a part of my everyday as a researcher.

OKUDA Taro

Philosophy, ethics, applied ethics. Though previously seeing myself as a philosopher without a ‘field’ as such, recently I have begun to think that touching upon the intellectual ‘squirmings’ that occur amongst researchers who do have a field can perhaps be taken as my own research ‘field’. Taking British moral philosophy and contemporary ethics as a theoretical background, my research engages, through an omnivorous array of approaches, with an assortment of themes including whistleblowing, waste, smoking, and doughnut holes.

NAKAMURA Sae

Cultural anthropology, South Asian studies, with a focus on Sri Lanka. My research has examined the elderly, family, healthcare and welfare in the suburbs of the city of Colombo as well as arid plain agricultural communities, particularly in residential care facilities for the elderly. Through this research group I hope to deepen an understanding of those realities from which we avert our gaze; specifically, when we try to fix upon these realities (or ignore them?), I believe that we become aware of our related sensory reactions, and occasionally are struck by the opportunity for change.

Oscar WRENN (research group assistant):

Doctoral student at the Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University. Social anthropology. Currently engaging in long-term fieldwork in an upland Japanese community, my research interests lie in agriculture, depopulation and rural decay, and specifically the ‘lived’ landscapes of such rupture, inhabited by and through multiple species. I also work as an editor and translator, with recent edited works such as The Archaeology of Medieval Towns: Case Studies from Japan and Europe (2020, Archaeopress).

SAKAI Tomoko (research group representative)

Research fields include Ireland, United Kingdom, Chile, and the Tohoku coast. Main works include, The Troubles in the Everyday: An Ethnography of Memory and Narrative in Northern Ireland (2015, Jinbun Shoin) and Stitching Memoryscape: Chilean Arpilleras and Expressions of Catastrophe (2017, Stitching Memoryscape Executive Committee), etc.