4) Culture of the Fukushima Disasters--presentation by Dr. Dan O'Neill

"Animal Media: Documenting Life in Japan’s Nuclear Exclusion Zone"
Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California at Berkeley

The return of animal life to the nuclear exclusion zone coincided with the emergence of new media forms mobilized to assess life in the post 3.11 moment. I consider this peculiar conjuncture of rewilding and media assemblage as an opportunity to think through the relations of animals and sensing technologies as well as the transformative potential of these relations for critical thought. I take up animal photography and Geiger counter-videos as my objects of study in order to understand how these and other evolving documentary forms are used to produce environmental knowledge as well as how they are reassembled to help us make sense of the phobias, emotional indeterminacies, and new affective relations generated through and with located relationships and encounters among species, human and nonhuman.

Dan O’Neill is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a scholar of modern literature and cinema (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). His research interests include gender and sexuality studies, and the intersections of environmental humanities and media theory. His current book project traces an emergent inter-medial history of the 3.11 disasters. His articles appeared in journals including Japan Forum, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, and Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.