Environmental & Economic Challenges in Global Asia

Chair/Moderator: Joonmo Kang, Assistant Professor, Social Welfare, University of Kansas

Pravat Ranjan Sethi, Independent Scholar, History, “Urban Futures under Pressure: Environmental Risk, Economic Precarity, and the Politics of Resilience in Global Asia” 

Ikuho Amano, Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “Industrial Tourism Today: Boosting Economy, Overcoming Uncertainty – Cases in Yokohama and Vicinity” 

Ningxuan Zhuo, Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Amsterdam, “The wild boar that “broke into” Nanjing: Wildlife and human in the process of urbanization"

Aditi Basu, Independent Scholar, Political Science, “Jharkhand’s Millet Story: The End of Capitalism and Patriarchy?” 

Chair/Moderator: Francesco Carota, Assistant Professor, Architecture & Design, University of Kansas

Keni Li, PhD Researcher, School of Modern Language and Culture “Ecofeminist, Women’s Body and Sea: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists’ Ocean Metaphors”

Yoshihiro Yasuhara, Associate Teaching Professor, Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University, “Legacy of an Idealist - In the Case of Seiji Tsutsumi/Takashi Tsujii” 

Shelby Oxenford, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, “Writing the Wave: Anticipating Near Future Climate Disasters in Contemporary East Asian Literature"

Ven Godamune Chullanaga Thero, Independent Scholar, “Pali and Buddhist Studies, “Eco-Dharma in Visual Culture: A Systematic Review of Buddhist-Inspired Artistic Representations of Environmental Crisis (Film, Painting, Sculpture, and Digital Art)” 

Visual news footage of the catastrophe of March 11, 2011 compelled the creation of this work. The opening clusters in the lowest register of the piano evoke the subterranean roar of the earthquake — an overwhelming force rising from the depths of the earth. These dense sonorities fracture suddenly into silence, reflecting the immediate stillness that followed: cities hushed, lives stilled, humanity and nature suspended in grief.

Silence plays a central role in the composition. It represents absence — of voices, of movement, of birds in the sky — but also space for remembrance.

Cindy stitches her response to the horrors of March 11, 2011 in Japan. 

Building on a conversation in coastal Fukushima in October 2024—where a misunderstanding over what “AI/ai” might signify became an analytic starting point—this talk examines why and how care for Fukushima and other nuclear peripheries demands renewed attention as the Fukushima nuclear accident passes its fifteenth anniversary in March 2026. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on the shifting radiological and social afterlives of the 2011 disaster, it reflects on the enduring effects of fallout on residents of coastal Fukushima. The presentation also articulates concern over the emerging global nuclear–AI partnership: the growing reliance on nuclear energy to sustain the expanding demand for artificial intelligence amid intensifying climate crises. By juxtaposing technological acceleration with lived aftermath, the talk calls for renewed remembrance and critical reflection on Fukushima at a moment when nuclear resurgence—fueled by AI infrastructure—risks marginalizing or erasing the ongoing lives and vulnerabilities of those in and around the former evacuation zones of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Chair/Moderator: Megan Greene, Professor, History, University of Kansas

Christopher Heselton, Lecturer, Global Integrate Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “Unstable Shores: A Longue Durée Environmental History of State Power, Ecological Exploitation, and Social Dislocation in Yancheng.”

Daniel Knorr, Assistant Professor, History, Illinois State University, “A Trans-Diluvian History of Environmental Fragility and Resilience on the North China Plain.”

Steve K.L. Chan, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Keimyung University, and Charles Wong, Independent Scholar, “Environmentally Induced Mobility and Displacement: Severe Flooding in Hat Yai, Thailand.” 

Vineet Rathee, Lecturer, Anthropology, McGill University, “Farm Fires of Northern Indea: the Politics of Agrarianism.”

Ramesha Jayaneththi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ruhr University of Bochum, “Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Climate Resilience in Sri Lanka: Forest Protection and Environmental Ethics in Global Asia”