Sharon Traweek 0:05

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this event. My name is Sharon treweek. And I am a professor in the UCLA department of gender studies, the history department, and a member of the faculty advisory board for the UCLA terasaki Center for Japan, Japanese studies. And before the presentation today by Professor Kim fortune, we have four brief announcements. First, I will introduce the symposium of which this presentation is apart. Then I will introduce Professor Tamiya, director of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of science, who will describe their work. Next, Dr. 19, Tonio will give our indigenous land acknowledgement. And then I will introduce our speaker. So to begin introducing the symposium as a whole, it's, we've named it envisioning the next generation radiation governance symposium. And in her presentation today, Dr. Fortune will be posing questions and laying the groundwork for the force input for panel sessions that will succeed this, the fourth, there will be four more sessions on Monday or Tuesday, depending on where you are in the world. For the rest of March, the next panels will first of all, explore the archiving needed to support radiation governance, then, the second third meeting will be on the regulation of radiation governance. And the third meeting, sorry, the fourth meeting will be on the education needed to support radiation governance. And the last meeting will be on various places around the world, mostly in the United States, and in Japan, that are where radiation governance has become a large issue. And I just at the moment want to say a bit more about the title radiation governance, and what we mean by that. And as a part of that, I want to say something about disaster studies, perhaps you know, that recently, there was a grid collapse in Texas with a great deal of terrible weather, we could say that the disaster was the weather. But from a disaster studies perspective, the disaster was the infrastructure collapse. So when there is some kind of major problem in the world, we tend to call it a disaster. But we in disaster studies like to think about this idea of infrastructure, not just the technology, but the social, cultural, economic, political, aspects of the the webs of relationships that bind us together in everyday life, and how can we have a more robust infrastructure, and it would be for everything in life, not just disaster, but if we have a robust infrastructure, like a robust grid, then it will make much even disasters more resilient, we will be more resilient in the face of disasters. So what would governance be that infrastructure governance, and if we imagine right now, we, of course, know that there are many, many kinds of experts that we would call on, and some are represented in this symposium. social scientists, physical scientists, biologists, engineers, physicians, all kinds of people and class, we would also need to turn to the policymakers, and all the people who have been building and maintaining and upgrading various kinds of infrastructures, the internet, various other kinds of technologies we might use, as well as society as a whole, we would also want to turn to the affected communities, the people work in any community in any neighborhood, how might we all be planning to be more resilient together? So governance is about that process of us working together.

Sharon Traweek 4:25

And sometimes, as we all know, we have experts in a room. And we don't necessarily know how to talk with each other, pay attention to each other, understand each other, respect each other's data, and so forth. So, our project in this larger project, of which this symposium is a part of the disaster sts research group, how do we learn how to govern together? So we're trying to build capacity in larger capacity for this kind of governance, and in this case, radiation now I'd like to having introduced the symposium, I'd like to turn now to Professor Tamiya of Sofia University and also the director of the gsps San Francisco office. So, Mr. Sorry, Professor to me. Oh, would you please.

Toru Tamiya 5:20

Thank you very much for my briefing. Good action. I already retired from the fire University. So now I'm director of the gsps San Francisco office. So my name is Tony Kamiya. I'm the director of Japan Society for the Promotion of science. j. s. p. s. San Francisco office. On behalf of jsps. I would like to thank the distinguished panelists, guests and all possible for making this symposium possible. I would like to thank organizing group, especially Sharon tree Trebek professor, UCLA Kim 14, professor of UC Irvine hirota K, Su Nevada director, General ameritas Ke Ke and nodding, tan, can you or you see our outline. We also would like to thank Morita Kawano center for for Japanese studies at UCLA, and many other persons, including Oliver, who helped this remote symposium possible. Thank you very much. I'm honored to make this address as one of the sponsors and filled with deep emotion for the 10th anniversary of cushy ma nuclear reactor failla as one of Japanese Japanese, the title of this symposium is in measuring next generation radiation governance to approach the topic from various prospective panelists in the five session sessions are the leading scholar from diverse field and impact impressive array of researchers who are with a wide variety of specialization has assembled here. I believe that the presentation vigorous discussion and debate held during this, this symposium will in college asked to create a new vision for the next generation radiation governance. It is my hope that this will also lead to the creation and strengthening of international research network that are so crucial to advancing human knowledge and understanding. For these seeking to deepen international research tie ties jsps supports short term and long term fellowship program for collaborative research at inverse Japanese universities or Institute. These programs are available for PhD candidates, postdoc, Doctor, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members. If you are interested, interested, please attend our information session. Another day. I would like to finish the by thanking you all for supporting the gsps san fran San Francisco office in promoting international academic exchange at cross the world wide spectrum of youth. Thank you.

Nadine Tanio 9:24

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to participants from around the world wherever you are situated. Our radiation governance opposing symposium hosted by UC Irvine with UCLA and support from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of science San Francisco, and UCLA stereo sokhi Center for Japanese studies, acknowledges the hochiminh and the gabrielino Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of taganga. The Los Angeles Basin, Southern Channel Islands and including the region from the Santa Ana river. Aliso Creek and beyond. Additionally, the greater Los Angeles area is home to the largest indigenous population in the US. It is the ancestral home of the Tongva, a hochiminh, the Chumash the Tuttavia, the koala, the chairman quaver, the PIPA, accum hamaca, the morongo, the pachanga, the valentijn, the soboba, among many other peoples. It is also presently home to large communities of indigenous people from the greater Turtle Island, the Pacific Islands and Central and South America, including Zapotec, and Mixtec peoples. We acknowledge that Los Angeles is also a place with large communities of Two Spirit peoples who organize and fellowship with each other. We acknowledge colonization as an ongoing

Unknown Speaker 10:53

process,

Nadine Tanio 10:54

the need to continue repairing the harm caused to indigenous peoples around the world, and a special need to better government radiation hazards in indigenous communities.

Sharon Traweek 11:12

Thank you. As part of those things, I would like to like to thank the terrorist hockey Center at UCLA and the Japan Society for the Promotion of science, as well as the UC Irvine anthropology department and the disaster sts network for all of the support that has been offered for this symposium. We are grateful. I would also like to thank Koji Hirata the the jsps, Washington, DC office and Professor Hirotaka Sugata, who was direct Director General of kk and also former director of the jsps washington dc office, both of whom who helped us guided us over the last few years, as we planned the development of this section of this symposium. And now I would like to introduce Professor Kim fortune was an environmental sociologist, sorry, anthropologist. We could describe her career just in terms of the places She has worked at, beginning with her graduate degree from Rice University, then her time at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and now at University of Irvine, we would also need to emphasize her leadership roles. She has been Chair of her department at Rensselaer Polytechnic and also at the anthropology department at UC Irvine. She has been president of the International Society for the social studies of science from 2017 to 2019. Helping that group, emphasize its international transnational engagements with all kinds of work in science, technology and medicine, in different contexts, and how those forces shaped people's lives and are addressed in media law and politics. She has also been the person one of the leaders in developing the platform for experimental and collaborative ethnography. There are major features of her career from you will hear her address some of her research in her presentation today. But at the moment, I want to emphasize that in addition to her leadership, in terms of scholarly organizations, and university departments, and developing resources, she has been a major leader in the development of theoretical and methodological developments in the field of anthropology, for which she is recognized internationally. And I'd also like to say that it's been my great pleasure to have known Kim for a long time, I actually first met her in a seminar I was teaching. So I, it's a great pleasure, I want to introduce you to Professor Kim fortune.

Kim Fortun 14:20

Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Professor trout for that kind introduction. And as Professor trout noted, she was one of my teachers many years ago and has continued to provide guidance throughout my career.

Kim Fortun 14:37

So Hello, and welcome to the envisioning next generation radiation governance symposium. It's a real honor to be providing opening remarks. In this presentation, I'll share what I've learned through involvement in the planning and delivery of new educational programs built in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster to ready a new generation of radiation Health experts for roles in disaster governance. I became involved in this work through a series of meetings convened convened by the Division of Human Health at the International Atomic Energy Agency and Fukushima Medical University, convened to consider how medical education needed to change to prepare medical professionals for roles in radiation health, disaster prevention and response. These meetings brought together medical practitioners with varied experiences, government representatives responsible for government risks, disaster risk, reduction and response and researchers specializing in social studies of science and technology, including some like myself, specializing in social studies of disaster. These meetings led to curriculum development at Fukushima Medical University. They also shaped new programs at Nagasaki University in Hiroshima university to educate a new generation of radiation and disaster experts prepared to work across the cycle of radiation disaster, from prevention to immediate aftermath through recovery. Both programs draw street students from many countries, especially those facing considerable radiation hazards. Belarus and Kazakhstan for example, we'll learn more about the program at Nagasaki University and the fourth panel of the symposium on March 22 23rd. I have taught a virtual short course in the program at Nagasaki University for the past five years, it has been a great privilege and learning experience to work with the Nagasaki university students. I think all of the students that I have taught for what they have taught me about radiation health hazards in different places, and about the kinds of educational and governance capacities we need to build for the future. I also think Professor tech Mora and others at Nagasaki University for giving me this opportunity, and Dr. Ruthie Chen for first drawing me into the work while he was director of AI a Division of Human Health. Dr. Chen was born in Cambodia, was educated in France than was a professor of Radiology for over 30 years with work experience in many countries. He holds a medical degree and doctorates in both education and the history of medicine. I point now to Dr. chems impressive range to foreshadow what will be a theme throughout my remarks, the importance of transnational transdisciplinary perspective in envisioning and building next generation radiation governance. I also thank our sponsors for this symposium, UCLA terasaki Center for Japanese studies, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of science and the staff at these organizations and at my at my home department, the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, that helped us with these preparations. as Professor travel noted, I am neither a specialist in the study of Japan nor specialist in the study of nuclear hazards. I'm a cultural anthropologist specializing in the study of science, technology and environmental disaster. My perspective on Fukushima is that somewhat out of focus, which I've come to see as having its own value and disaster context, it also gives me an off center vantage point for raising questions about Japan's past and future leadership role in radiation research, education, medicine and regulation in a global planetary frame. As I'll describe the initiative that I was involved in in Japan after Fukushima spiraled out from a focus on the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant explosion, into a wide ranging deliberation about the need for enhanced collaboration across regions, organizations, disciplines in generations, addressing many different kinds of radiation hazards from mines, uranium processing facilities, test sites, power plants, and medicine in many different settings. Fukushima became a flashpoint for considering what next generation radiation governance needed to become. In this Japan's role at the ethical center of radiation knowledge expanded and transformed, moving from a role as a steward of memory to a role of steward of an expansive array of complex contemporary problems, from a commitment to never again to inventive civic capacity building for the future.

Unknown Speaker 19:39

Before going forward, let

Kim Fortun 19:40

me share how I came into these deliberations in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. As noted earlier, it was not as a specialist on Japan or on nuclear power. My research is focused on the hazards and font harms of the petrochemical industry, starting from my PhD research in the late 1980s with an extended study of the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal, India, and disaster that exposed hundreds of 1000s to toxic gas, killing 1000s immediately and many more in the years since, as a disaster still referred to as the world's worst industrial disaster, with ongoing litigation. Death counts are still disputed today as our living health effects. Many refer to the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster as a second disaster. Japan and Hiroshima in particular, were important references in this work from the start. The very first scholarly analysis of the Bhopal disaster that I encountered for example, read as a beginning PhD student before ever traveling to Bhopal or deciding that it would be a key field side began as follows Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Guernica, My Lai and Pol pots complementary F. To this glossary, we must add a new name Bhopal. To understand what has happened in Bhopal at the author say they call upon us to grasp what Susan Sontag has called the imagination of disaster, the collective representations, the myths, the symbols, the allegories, the images, secular and religious available for understanding of catastrophe. What they want to show us is, quote how the very structure of modern industrialism encodes the understanding of the catastrophe in quote vishwanathan and Qatar his emphasis was on the bureaucratization of Bhopal on ways that catastrophe was localized and controlled into a series of humdrum acts as they say, as one doctor they spoke to put it, quote, The victim has to be processed, carved out and milked and every one of the little bureaucrats the government doctors, the policeman, the ration shop owner, social worker and political goon had to have their cut. It was the remnants that went to the victim, the mind itself was on the assembly line. bureaucracy this needed to be understood as its institutionalized objectification and vivisection to allow for control and domestication. The disaster became a banality. They argued banality not unlike that described by Hannah rent in trying to account for Eichmann's violence in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, banality is an effective split vision they say and is not only in the assembly line, it acquires a more lethal form in the everyday perception of bureaucrats. Problems are encased in modules routinized and serialized to accommodate the office file. Reddit ready to be discussed ad phenom fish would not fit in Qatari insisted that it was not the corruption of the clerk that they were talking about. But the ritualized procedure of thinking of the disaster through a bureaucratic grid. In quote, the essay points to challenge that will that we still contend with in disaster response today, the urgent need for functioning bureaucracy, alongside recognition of all the bureaucracy can accomplish and heal, for example, the need to recognize the incompatibility of disaster while needing to put each disaster in a comparative frame so that they can't be cast as exceptions abstracted from history and structural dynamics. I arrived in Bhopal in late 1989, just as the legal case was being settled by the Indian Supreme Court, like the Fukushima disaster, it called for analysis at many scales at the scale of the plant design and piping configurations at the landscape scale where people lived in its vicinity, and at the global scale with the reach of a multinational corporation.

Kim Fortun 24:06

Hiroshima continued to be an important reference point. The statue created by Ruth Waterman and Sanjay Mitra still stands outside the gates of the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. On the opposite side of the road, adjacent to a painfully under-resourced expose community. The words at the base of the statue are simple. No Hiroshima, noble Paul, we want to live. The research that I did in both Paul and later in the United States at fenceline. Communities here can be read as a study of different ways of remembering Bo Paul, and a study of how different modes of remembrance shapes what can follow. I work closely with guests survivor organizations in both Hall and later with chemical plant communities facing similar risk in the United States. My book advocacy after both Paul describes different stakeholders understood and responded to the Bhopal disaster in ways that revealed their understandings of what caused the disaster of justice and of the changing world system that the Bhopal was case was playing out within and could be set to index. The book describes growing recognition of uneven distributions of environmental risk and the emergence of environmental justice movements to address this. It describes the logics through which environmental health problems are filtered and often discounted by medical professionals, courts and multinational corporations. It details and emerging global political economic system that is not adequately governed by established legal regimes. In many ways this research prepared me for what we contend with in Fukushima the years that I spent in Bhopal during field research were were were sober and the sadness is sadness of it has stayed with me ever since. Staying with this in one is one way that I remember Bhopal. important for our to death discussion today is that is the way that I found guidance and Sucre in the work of postwar Japanese writers, particularly kenzaburo, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. The guidance was somewhat straightforward. Working as a journalist, had been sent to Hiroshima to document and analyze the competing political factions that had emerged after the bombing. His book, Hiroshima notes documents this, while also being an extraordinary testimonial to what the atomic bomb brought to Hiroshima, and to the world.

Kim Fortun 26:47

Well, Paul was on my mind as I watched the Fukushima disaster unfold. The disasters were and continue to be very different and unique. But there was also notable structural similarities that called for juxtaposition and comparative reflection. My sense of the importance of this, this deepened through a meeting in Berkeley, California in 2019, that brought together social science and humanities researchers from the United States, Japan and elsewhere, with special knowledge of different dimensions of the 311 disaster. There were also representatives of Japanese government agencies, it was a productive but frustrating meeting. The need for disaster response still felt very urgent, but the diversity of expertise and perspective was difficult to contend with. We didn't know how to work well together. the frustration of this meeting made a mark on many of us who participated, galvanizing a sense that we needed to build collaborative capacity in advance of disaster, readying ourselves to contribute to both prevention and response. This in turn led to the establishment of the disaster sts network and supporting digital platform, and later the radiation governance Working Group, then organize this symposium, we're still reaching to figure out what kinds of collaborative capacity we need and how we can build it. Rather ironically, it was after the 2013 meeting in Berkeley that I was invited to join a series of meetings hosted by IAEA meetings that were exceedingly more diverse in many different ways. For me, these meetings were very generative and Memorial. In an early meeting, for example, Japanese physicians who served at the frontline of emergency medical response in the Fukushima disaster describe not only being overwhelmed with responsibilities, while also concerned about the health of their families, colleagues and themselves, but also with the need to work beyond the roles for which they were trained and had credentials that were memorably unbold describing agonizing judgment calls they had to make when the situation of cult called upon them to do what they were not prepared to do. The discussion later extended to consider how the enculturation of professionals in different disaster contexts prepares them differently for the dynamics of disaster. In the United States, for example, there's often celebration, in depth disaster response and beyond of thinking outside the box to solve problems innovating on the fly. This can be useful, it also easily veers towards arrogant machismo and unaccountable individualism. Much can be learned through juxtaposition of these differences. Another meeting centered on different ways of thinking about radiation health hazards at different scales. Dr. Chen drew and experts from his community of radiologists who shared their concerns about the health effects of recurrent x rays to track conditions like scoliosis. These concerns continue to be debated among radiologists and we need to understand differences perspectives. In the IEE A meetings in Fukushima. This presentation made clear that things look different at different scales that granularity and resolution matter, and that radiation experts in different fields frame and see problems differently. And yet another meeting, we discussed the expected expansion of nuclear power generation in Asia, and the kinds of information sharing and coordination this called for. In my own presentations at these meetings, I shared insights from historical and anthropological studies of disaster in different times and places, and analytic frameworks that I found useful in my own research to understand different disaster governance styles, for example, and for explicating, the many scales and systems in play in complex disaster. My presentation that seemed to have the most impact, especially among Japanese colleagues, was not around these analytic frameworks. However, it was a presentation centered on different ways in framing and seeing disaster, and how this is conditioned by history. It was a presentation about how one's vantage point matters, a presentation about how the past haunts what we see and know in the present. To get it this, I didn't share research findings in the conventional sense, I shared images, some with optical illusions. With this image, for example, I asked people to look first at the top of the image, allowing a landscape and waterfall to come into view. And then to start at the bottom of the image seeing hooded figures. What one sees in combination is that vantage point matters.

Kim Fortun 31:45

I also then ask them to look closely at images like these, considering how they are part of a set. I then reveal that these images are from a children's book, Alphabet City. Knowing this helps knowing this helps viewer seeing letters in the urban landscape, but also makes it difficult not to see letters, overwhelming other ways of seeing. My point here was to draw out how theories and frames condition and delimit what we see helping us see things but also making it difficult to see anything else. This isn't avoidable, it is how knowledge production and expertise works. a workaround remedy is to multiply the frames through which one sees conceiving of robust expertise as kaleidoscopic, with capacity to see in many different ways, transnational transdisciplinary, cross generation, collaboration and genders this and that need to underpin the knowledge build for next generation radiation governance. In preparing and delivering the presentation I just referred to I worried that I was being too obtuse that the distance across disciplines and language would make it hard to convey what I wanted to share. But it was these images that Japanese colleagues wanted to come back to and discuss referring to them as my pictures. In these pictures, there seemed to be openings to consider what radiation governments could and needed to become beyond what we can present presently imagine. Part of the work will be in bringing new content and skills into professional training and practice. That is also about new figurations of knowledge, expertise and professionalism. The IAEA convene meetings that I was involved in wrapped up in 2016. A year later, I began teaching at a distance in the University of Nagasaki's master's program. The course I was assigned, originally co taught with Dr. Ruthie Chim, was titled in advanced social medicine. I approach the work very humbly aware that the students in the course came from many countries working in many languages, with advanced training in health and medical sciences. Most had very little prior education in the humanities and social sciences. I thought this taught thought deeply and expansively about what the University of Nagasaki program and students needed from me and had many exchanges with colleagues seeking their insight. My teaching, of course, began before before I figured it all out. So I also learned a great deal from my students, we really built the course together. Again, Fukushima became a flashpoint for very expansive thinking about what radiation and disaster education needs to become. Our focus was on qualitative methods for characterizing different places for rate for facing radiation health hazards, using this analytical framework to draw out particular contexts while seeing different places side by side. In working through these cases, we continue to learn that Each case is distinctive, while also structurally similar, and that there are critical lessons in each. We work through texts like this one authored by Aya Camorra, about radio titled radiation brain mom's drawing out of it, how you approach a study of radiation disaster through a qualitative frame. We also studied St. Louis as a place of radiation hazards. St. Louis, was a site where your uranium was processed to build the atomic bomb in the 1940s. contamination of the site continues today, and is the what you see in this images or documentary films that we use to approach the site trying to understand the diversity of stakeholders and the deaf diversity of organizational actors. Importantly, in St. Louis, there is an interpretive center run by the US Department of Energy charged to help guide stewardship of the site for the very, very long term on the order of 1000 years. So considering places of memorialization places of education is something that we return to in our consideration of Fukushima. This is this is a view of the Office of legacy management Museum in St. Louis. We also consider the case of uranium mining in Indian Namibia, and the case of

Kim Fortun 36:41

the case of the Marshall Islands. Importantly, the Marshall Islands not only deals with legacy, nuclear position, but also is buffeted in a particularly harsh way by climate change, throwing forward the need to consider a compound disaster as we move forward. And then we also study the case of uranium mining on Navajo Nation under the guidance of my colleagues, Thomas Dupree, who does research focused on divergent perspectives on what counts as as mind cleanup a question that is reconsidered around the world. Importantly, Dr. Dupree is modeling for the rest of us how to build cases of cases about irradiated places that we can use for our teaching going forward. And this is the vision that we have coming from the symposium that we're launching today. What we hope to build is a set of cases like these, these cases are focused on toxic petrochemical pollution, they serve as the basis for teaching across campuses and become can become the basis of a shared language from which we can build radiation governance going forward. From the from the cases that we've that we've worked with in my Nagasaki course, it's clear that the issues are expansive. nuclear facilities around the world are near there are commissioned life. Of course, there's our near their. Their commission live, many sites are buffeted by climate change. Waste hasn't been dealt with. And there's there's the question of nuclear and planning for a green transition. Just in the last week, Bill Gates has published a book calling for proactive work on climate change. One of his proposals is for the department of energy of the US to dramatically increase its investment in energy research at the order of the US National Institute of Health. This is another question for radiation governance, what kinds of research we need to be investing in going forward? Where is nuclear in the mix? Where is nuclear in an energy transition? The debates are intense, and our students need to be ready to play leadership roles.

Kim Fortun 39:15

What then do I envision going forward? This impart is reflected in the design of this symposium that this presentation launches, bringing people together across geography, generation and discipline, to puzzle through quick key questions together. Importantly, as in the University of Nagasaki program that I teach in, we want to address the whole disaster cycle, being ready for recovery when needed, but putting our energy hearts and souls into prevention. There is of course much in the middle. The world is scattered with sites of slow disaster, many with remarkable compound vulnerability sites of active and abandoned mined in Navajo Nation Namibia and Russia. For example, sites Where a nuclear waste is stored or planned to be stored, some manage some illicit, some lost, all hazardous, all calling for very extended management. Many are also subject to the upsets of climate change. Remembering Fukushima today means keeping all of these sites in view, Japan needs to be situated not only globally but in a planetary frame. Such an approach will depend on transnational collaborative capacity that hasn't yet been built. We will need to work between the silos that separate not only regions and disciplines but also types of hazards, bringing concerns about uranium mining and processing, nuclear power and waste, nuclear war and nuclear medicine, interconnect connection, and situating. These alongside other hazards produced by the petrochemical industry, climate change and war for example, recognizing compound vulnerability and the potential for compound disaster, fast and slow. Next Generation government shouldn't be atomize. That's our focus on radiation governance rather than on atomic memory on building new knowledge forms and relations. Rather than working to extend established frames. Fukushima can become a symbol for this richly poly Simic bringing many things together a symbol that is both a warning and a beacon. Many people organizations and programs are doing good important work on nuclear issues. Next Generation radiation governance needs to involve and support them, respecting diverse perspectives and context, always remembering the histories that weighed them. Next Generation radiation governance also needs to produce its own practitioners, a new generation of radiation experts. This is a key focus of the work we have in mind for the radiation governance working group that organized this symposium. A focus on education will address the so called pipeline issue actively bringing students into fields where many of the practitioners are near the end of their careers. Focusing on education for next generation radiation governance also creates opportunities to reconfigure radiation expertise, moving from avid atomized and siloed to expansively connected forms of expertise, from forms of expertise, unaware of ways history wait them to actively reflect, to be actively reflective and thus more creative and inventive in their expertise. The educational challenge is great, effective next generation radiation governance will depend on this not just building more expertise, but new forms of expertise built from new knowledge forms and relations. Our role as educators will thus be paradoxical. We need to teach our students what we don't yet know how to do. We need to teach our students to go beyond us and beyond the university is currently institutionalized. The new forms of knowledge and expertise needed can't just be developed and pushed out from established centers of nuclear power, whether that be us, the US, Japan, France or Russia, the centers still have great responsibility and work to do to address radiation hazards. They also in my view, need to make way for the emergence of fundamentally new ways of thinking about and governing radiation, they can become host enacting a kind of hospitality that sincerely welcomes foreigners because of their differences, not in spite spite of them. Hosting that cultivates explanatory pluralism in radiation governance. organizations like the Japan Society for the Promotion of science, and UCLA terasaki Center for Japanese studies, our sponsors today can facilitate this, leveraging the perspective they've gained over many years of work in and beyond Japan, linking Japan to an array of issues and places. There will be translation challenges at many scales. We have already seen the challenges at the idiomatic level, for example, just in trying to translate radiation governance into Japanese, German, Turkish, Hindi, Navajo and other languages you see here in this slide, the translation, you see here dependent on extensive exchanges between people working across different languages, recognizing that neither radiation nor governance translates easily.

Kim Fortun 44:41

In closing, I want to return to my observation that there has been a commendable move in Japan, among the people that I had the privilege to work with, from a focus on recollection of the horrors of radiation to reconstitution from memory to practice, investing in the building of programs and capability. For governing radiation in the future, I also want to highlight a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this endeavor that I hope we can contend with together. As we move through our upcoming symposium sessions and beyond. The much awarded Japanese author Yoko Agarwal, commenting on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gives us a place to start. Ogawa voiced his concern shared by many we have communicated with him planning this symposium. The memories of the atomic bombing are increasingly precarious today, because few firsthand witnesses are still living because of fading anti militarism because of a general sense, particularly among younger people in Japan, that these issues don't have bearing on them. This of course, challenges and must stimulate the work of building next generation radiation governance. Oh, God will also argue that we we need literature in order to remember because to ask people to remember other people's memories is fundamentally irrational. Because of this, she says, political and academic thinking and institutions are poorly suited for the task. Oh, God was argument about the irrationality of remembering the devastation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is compelling, the cause for elaboration. academic institutions are indeed venues for rational deliberation. And for the development of capacity for this and for the translation of rational calculation into scientific knowledge, engineering, architecture and law and policy. We need such calculations not only to materially support but to justify our societies working out rationalities can be a way to be accountable to each other. The rationality is are by their very nature and limiting, extending what we already know. rationalities reproduce the past even if the name in the name of movement forward, Matt rationality undergirds progress, weighted by history. But what if history is acknowledged to be Riven with violence is what if there are inherent as inheritances that we want to disown, academic and literary thinking, rationality and history cannot it seems to me be separated? We need to think in historical and literary terms to know what kinds of academic and institutions and thinking we need to build for many things, and especially to support next generation radiation governance.

Kim Fortun 47:38

A short story by kenzaburo OEI in a translated collection by the same name teach us to outgrow our madness helps with this explication. The main character is a morbidly waiting man is obsessed about his own sanity, sanity, because he needs to be able to care for his brain disordered son he or who is also very fat. One heavy restraint that the man hopes to cast off is a legacy of his own father, also a very fat man who spent his last year self imprisoned in a storehouse, quote, wanting to deny the reality of a world where Japan was making war on the China he revered in quote, seeking to understand not only his father's desk but quote, the free Chris something which underlay it in quote, The Man addresses his mother on home he has said to depend, to a degree extraordinary for an adult his age, drunk one night and fearing that he had gone blind because dust had blown in his eyes, the man called out, quote, mother or mother helped me please, if I should go blind and lose my mind, what will become of my son? Teach me mother? How can we all outgrow our madness? In quote? Clearly, the answer is far from straightforward and partly rests on the figure of the man son, he or he or like his own son, Hikari does not make sense in Rational terms. His brain is disordered, he sees things differently. In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1994, showed that Hikari his son couldn't communicate verbally until he was six years old. The first sound spoken at the age of six responded not to a human voice, but to the sounds of birds. In another venue, I also shared his realization of the power and reach of his son's communication through his music, his son had found another way, will always will was to make space for him to clear the way for him to be heard. I find this to be a powerful allegory for thinking about what next generation radiation governance will entail, acknowledging the weight of the past will be crucial so that we can move beyond it. This is a contradictory injunction that it seems to me We must take very seriously, how can our archives museums, regulations and educational programs accomplish this? redirecting and rereading always questions seems a place to start. always waiting man addresses his question about how to outgrow their madness to his mother. The weight of his body and his family's history portends a response that isn't promising. But there is another pillar to the story. Another direction to look towards the man son, er, er who thinks so differently as to seem defective, away doesn't overtly say that there is promise in this direction. There's no racket rational calculation of what a future less weighted by the past would entail. But OEI does let ER and his son Hikari function as beacons as calls to different ways of thinking and communicating, recognizing and shifting the heavy weight of the past. The sun see the world from a different vantage point commuting, communicating at times in Birdsong, this it seems to me as what we need to cultivate a next generation radiation governance pluralizing the vantage points from which we consider the array of issues needing attention, recognizing the limits of established forms of communication, and redirecting our address our questions to address the next generation on their own terms, in ways that allows them to live across radiated past presence and futures stewarding us forward in our attempt to outgrow our madness. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to our discussion.

Nadine Tanio 52:00

Please feel free to submit questions in the q&a. There's one question I may read it for you. Is there a reason that that isn't there? Is there a reason you did not include Chernobyl in your talk and jump from book book Hall in 1984, to Fukushima and 2011. As you know, the Chernobyl 1986 is considered to be the world's most catastrophic anthropogenic industrial disaster. I have visited with this person has visited the exclusion zone, and 97 and spent two days in the control room and there's also visited Fukushima, and can attest that Chernobyl should be considered in the same league as Bhopal in Fukushima. This is Professor

Sharon Traweek 52:51

McCarthy.

Kim Fortun 52:54

Thank you for the question. I certainly agree that Chernobyl rest alongside Bhopal and Fukushima among the cases that we need to memorialize and teach. We would I address, we address the case in my course. I think that my my focus in this presentation was to consider the the many, many cases beyond those that so often focus our attention. And so to learn to think about Fukushima, through other cases around the world to expand what it means to think about Chernobyl to include other sites of power generation of decommission plants, etc. So it's certainly not an argument to to discount the importance of Chernobyl in radiation memory and as a touch point for considering what kinds of radiation governance is needed.

Nadine Tanio 53:54

There's another question from Professor Fisher. Can you see that? I'm Kim?

Kim Fortun 53:59

The question to know

Nadine Tanio 54:00

Yeah, so it's Have you tried using novels and stories with the MA studies at Nakashima? is referring to your beautiful use of Oh, I

Kim Fortun 54:12

I'm sorry. I couldn't quite hear the question.

Nadine Tanio 54:15

I'm sorry. Um, Professor Fisher. Michael Fisher asks, have you tried using novels and stories with your ma students at Nakashima episodic I,

Kim Fortun 54:26

I have not yet brought novels and stories into my teaching with my Nagasaki students, they would be exceptionally capable dealing with them. I'm sure. I have them for a short seven weeks. So it's it's matter of delimitation rather than importance, but it's a great suggestion.

Nadine Tanio 55:13

There's another question several more.

Sharon Traweek 55:17

The question is which points

Nadine Tanio 55:18

would you include in motivation remarks to lessons about radiation disasters to general medical practitioners all over the world?

Kim Fortun 55:28

Thank you for that question, Paulina. I think that what I've learned working with health professionals in Japan, is the need to broaden their education to include analyses of other dimensions of the disaster, the social and cultural dimensions, but also the engineering dimensions, because as one of the key lessons of the book that we discussed at the Fukushima Medical University meetings was that the way that health is, health is made and taken care of way beyond the bounds of the human body, through our technical infrastructure through our public programmings. And we need medical practitioners to be ready to be advocates for that to help design those systems to think of health in very, very expansive terms.

Nadine Tanio 56:24

Dr. Mica Suarez asks, first says thank you for this wonderful talk. How can we use these tools for thinking about large scale disasters in dealing with small with local, small scale, more could quotidian disasters,

Kim Fortun 56:39

I think that's one of the greater challenges in building radiation governance capacity going forward. There are many, many sites of non dramatic, slow disaster their sites have there's many abandoned sites where or lost sites where there are nuclear waste. There are there are mining sites around the world with with very, very limited media attention. My students at University of Nagasaki have developed case studies of these sites working in languages that I can't work in. And so drawing the less dramatic cases beyond Chernobyl, beyond Fukushima, into the frame of what it means to steward Fukushima going forward, I think is critical. The interdisciplinary case study framework that we're using to build these cases, importantly, can be used to draw out and characterize as sites of radiation hazards, fast and slow, big and small, and yet put them in within a set for comparative consideration.

Nadine Tanio 57:56

I'm one from MK, Tom, this is their anthropologist from Hong Kong and have been doing fieldwork in Fukushima since 2014. How do you see the Japanese government's response to the collaboration that you have initiated?

Kim Fortun 58:13

Thank you for the question. I think that the, from what I've observed that government has continued to support the educational programs that I've been involved in, and it's continued to support the Japanese Science Foundation's role in symposiums like this. I think that in all, in all disaster responses, the role of government is often uneven, because governments have a they have a tendency to want to kind of control the narratives around disaster, you certainly see this in the Department of Energy's long term stewardship museums in the United States. And so my emphasis on pluralizing. The way that the disasters are understood and talked about is partly a response to what we've seen across disaster cases where governments tend to want to kind of discount competing voices and have a narrative about disaster. That is promises to explain all.

Nadine Tanio 59:26

There's also a question about dosing or contamination criteria in international societies. Can you talk about the difference? The differences there are between disaster criteria and Ordinary Time criteria? And are there websites which collect such

Sharon Traweek 59:43

criteria?

Kim Fortun 59:46

I'm just reading the question here. So I think that your question is are there international standards for what counts as safe and unsafe contaminated and not contaminated? This is one of the big challenges with radiation governance going forward. The standards are diverse, globally, and still remained very, very contested. And from what I've learned following toxic chemicals, that contest station is not likely to settle down. So one of the key concepts I use in teaching is the idea of divergent data. I mean, how do you how do you make sense of divergent data claims? so that you can understand where there's a ratios where there's a sincere scientific difference. And so the I think that the discerning whether there should be a global standard, how those that those standards should be developed and stewarding is a central is the central challenge for radiation governance going forward?

Kim Fortun 1:01:05

So I have a question asking if I'm aware of the supposedly secret agreements in 19 9059, between IE a and the World Health Organization to play down nuclear accidents, radiation health effects? Yes, I'm certainly aware of the challenges to international to UN organizations, and particularly the IAEA has roles in radiation disaster response. I also know that the there's difference of perspective within these organizations. And a I mean, I'm often asked I mean, should we should we continue to work side by side with organizations that many feel have discounted problems in the past? And I think my my feeling is that we need to work alongside them to make them into the kind of organizations that we need them to be. And I recognize this is far from straightforward. And that's my interest, my emphasis in, in my remarks on recognizing the kind of weight of history in the way both experts in different fields and organizations see problems. And the kind of exclusion of, of scientific claims and data sets that are part of these controversies is part of what I want to up end in arguing for the significance and importance of explanatory pluralism.

Kim Fortun 1:02:48

So I have another question from Professor Fischer asking about the experiences of my students at the University of Nagasaki from say, Kazakhstan and Eastern Europe, especially working with or with bureaucracies and teaching them to be more flexible. One of a key concern I have going forward is to scaffold and support the students I've taught at the University of Nagasaki going forward, many of them will go back to their home countries in leadership roles, but in in many ways, isolated from the kind of professional networks that they'll need to sustain them in their work. Many of them face very, very severe limitations of media coverage of the issues. They're concerned about government transparency, access to information in the case studies that they build the original work that they do in my my course, the the harsh conditions, not only of understanding, but addressing these problems around the world has just been laid out before us. So I think a big challenge is how do we how do we support the work of radiation experts in different contexts, often contexts where they're very isolated? So Daniel Miller, as I said, I mentioned engineering, how are you engaging with the engineers who build and operate these nuclear systems upstream and down? That's a that's an excellent question. And for many, many years, until I moved to the University of California, Irvine, I taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is a primarily engineering institution. And it was a real privilege to teach engineering students who would go on to design and run the systems of concern that we're talking about. And so teaching those students to think expansively historically to imagine what creates conditions of vulnerability, to think socially about the distribution of risks. And to think culturally about the frames through which people see problems was a way that I could contribute to the kind of engineering needed needed in contexts that are not only technically complicated, have human health consequences, but often has to be carried out in situations of extreme controversy, lack of transparency, power dynamics from governments and corporations. And what I envision as next generation radiation governance is preparing our students not to deflect those controversies, but to really work within them, and assume and develop their work in in those contexts. So now I have a Oh, I'll also point out that in the third panel, our symposium the one focused on educational programs, we'll hear, we'll hear from Professor Tucker Mora at the University of Nagasaki program, about the design of the program there and why they have people like me teaching in it, why they've cultivated interdisciplinary perspective. We'll also hear from Professor saundra Schmid at at the University of Virginia, who has helped build a program, a program that brings social analysis and the trend to the training of nuclear engineers. So you'll want to return for that panel session. So we have from misread a question.

Kim Fortun 1:06:49

Okay, she asked that as we build more expansive and pluralistic data sets for understanding radiation harms and governance, knowledge from below, as she puts it, how do we infrastructure and curate and save those knowledge forms? And I think, again, that's a that's a critical part of the radiation governance challenge ahead of us. Now, there is, as most of you know, there's extraordinary work done on nuclear issues by an extraordinary array of organizations and institutions. There is a lot of entropy in it. And so figuring out how to just infrastructure, the capacity that's already there and connected, but to cut to infrastructure knowledge from below, especially at sites of less dramatic disaster that we are talking about previously. And this is why the the building of the disaster research networks digital platform is a step towards that direction for towards developing digital research capacity archiving capacity for a more diverse knowledge base for radiation governance, obviously, it's it's a huge socio technical challenge, but it's certainly on the table in our discussions of radiation health, government, radiation governance going forward.

Kim Fortun 1:08:23

So, I have a question about Bill Paul. Do I agree that the so called settlement of the Bhopal case was not a settlement, but a sellout?

Unknown Speaker 1:08:37

I

Kim Fortun 1:08:38

I went to Bhopal just I started my fieldwork in Bhopal, just as the settlement was being announced, and ended my research in India about three years later when the settlement was upheld by the Indian Supreme Court, and the at the time that it was upheld. Many activists argued that an argument is indeed governments of the representatives of the Government of India claim that the settlement really announced to the world that India was a friendly place for foreign investment. So this is a appointed example of the way that the outcomes of health assessment and legal legal processes get entangled up with things far beyond the health assessments of human bodies. And so the way that India's continued effort to attract multinational corporate capital shaped the decision in the Bhopal case, in my view is clear. And it's also clear that the compensation given to victims in the Bhopal case was simply insufficient and not comparable to compensation given in other disasters. I'll point out that the Bhopal case is still being used as a precedent for, for the way in which you take care of disasters, particularly when you've got claimants who, who can't who don't have access to procedural justice on their own. So again considering how these cases shape what will come out ahead of us is critical. So mystery has another question. Okay, how how does the eye as effort towards international harmonization of standards converge and contradict the symposiums goal of centering explanatory pluralism in next generation radiation governance, that's an excellently conceived question. And in in starting this, my my comments I, I noted in the deliberations of brown, Bhopal, the the struggle to make sense of the kind of role and limits of bureaucracy and bureaucracy is standardized protocols. We desperately need standardized protocols, including standards for toxics of all kinds and in terms of radiation. But we also need to acknowledge that those that get institutionalize will likely be weighted with corporate interest with state state efforts to discount the extent of the problem. So I think in sound, we need both. We need standard standards that we can govern with, and we need to keep those continually subject to question and democratic deliberation. So a question from Aaron right. I have a question about the level of the educational initiatives discussed here. These seems to be a graduate level, are there plans for more general education? governance from below? So I think the question is not only about so graduate education, there's university education, university undergraduate education, there's K through 12 education, and there's community education. And I think that what we're talking about in this symposium is all of those because I think that what we've learned is that we need extraordinary capacity, we need people thinking with us, we don't need to tell people in irradiated communities, what's safe and what's not safe, we need to help to give them the skills to participate in the discernments. And in the education. panel, one of the groups that will be presenting has extensive our experience with community education on Navajo Nation. So we'll be one place to begin that conversation.

Kim Fortun 1:13:11

An area of radiation icrp makes a framework of protection. What do you think about icrp? I think that I am not the best person to answer this question. This is where my kind of the limits of my nuclear expertise become really visible. I think that one of the one of the roles that I see for the radiation governance Working Group going forward is to do organizational profiles of organizations i icrp, ie a World Health Organization on radiation, where those with experience and insight on those organizations can collaboratively characterize what the history of those organizations are, what the capacities are. And I'll give you an example, when I was first invited to work with International Atomic Energy Agency, really as an outsider to radiation. I knew very little about its history or its modes of working. And so I was hesitant, but I think erred on the side of learning from and trying to contribute to civic capacity building, I would have been smarter and more of a resource in that work. If I had a way to quickly, quickly learn a history of Iowa that helped me understand its modes of seeing its frames what it tended to delimit what it didn't. One thing I learned in just my very brief work with them is the Department of division of human health, primarily charged with helping build capacity for radiation medical therapies around the world. What Usually in the mix on nuclear power plant safety issues. And so just bringing in that side of IAEA from what I was told, change the conversation within IE a in part because you had it brought in the medical education questions. So I have a question, could you please tell me what is the latest final death toll of the Bhopal based on your observations and findings, the death toll on Bhopal is still being disputed in the Indian courts. In the the well, the days after the disaster, the official government figures was about 3500, the local figures based on data such as number of deaths, shroud sold was around 10,000, the number who have died in the 30 plus years sense is even harder to calculate partly because many of the associated morbidities today are a consequence of slow disaster, the kind of continuing pollution at the plant associated with groundwater contamination. So I think I can't answer your question. The I don't I don't, I don't know a number. I know the number continues to be disputed. And I'll say that this kind of disputation over I what happened is part of all of the disasters I'd studied, and learning to see that as something that deserves continual deliberation, I think is, is something that we need to bring into our educational programs.

Kim Fortun 1:17:19

Since there's no questions, I can use this opportunity just to share with you our plans for the coming month, there are four panel sessions that will follow this one. The first will be focused on radiation archives with panelists with extensive experience building different kinds of archives with the intent of the panel discussing what's there now what's needed going forward. Importantly, an argument that I think will be worth a lot of discussion is how archives need to be coupled with and animated by educational programs, radiation kreative interdisciplinary radiation education programs are the subject of the third panel, which I believe is March 22. Third, but the middle planet between there is on next generation radiation governance. And a big challenge there, I mean, is to imagine what it means to open a conversation about governance that's across the types of sites and places where radiation hazards play out, from mining, to test sites, to waste streams, etc. So archives, regulation, educational programs, like the program at University of Nagasaki that I teach in, and then fourth, a section on teaching and governing irradiated places. So the kinds of case studies that I quickly showed you that we develop and work with in my course at Nagasaki, we're hoping to build a whole suite of those so that teachers around the world can contribute to them use them building our capacity to teach next generation radiation experts. You know, some will have more of an engineering focus, some will have more of a policy focus. But in that panel, we've invited people to help us think about if you are going to teach Fukushima in a university course for example, what are the what are the key insights from that, that disaster that will kind of empower next generation radiation governance? So Fukushima, the Fukushima disaster, strong group from the Navajo from Navajo Nation, St. Louis, will be represented. So we invite all of you who are either teachers or Work on cases that might contribute to this cache of case studies we want to build, we really welcome your participation and contributions. And we see this symposium as launching a ongoing dialogue and network. Again, we know that there's many networks out there, we're imagining this network as really supporting the development of interdisciplinary programs, interdisciplinary teaching of the next generation of radiation, governance practitioners, it will run alongside other teaching initiatives that broaden the frame even more running aside, for example, an initiative to build capacity to address petrochemical risk, because one of the one of many challenges we're facing here is the way in which radiation risk and all of the many, many issues around that so often are siloed, where they're never addressed. They're never dealt with in the same kind of conversation and programming of the risk in the petrochemical industry, for example. And so the way that bring interlacing issues, both helps us deal with the compound hazards, but also brings it brings insight from across those fields.

Sharon Traweek 1:21:31

Perhaps this is a time for me to introduce a conclusion. And to first of all, to thank Professor fortune for a wonderful presentation and explication of the challenges that lie ahead and further introduction to the rest of the symposium. So quite exciting. Thank you very, very much. And I want to again, thank the other people who have made the symposium possible. And I want to start with the Terra Saki center, and Marika Kono and Oliver Noel Shimizu. This is and of course, Etosha Abbey. And he, this has been a wonderful venue for us to get started. And also to thank Professor Tamiya and Miss Jones Newton from the Japan Society for the Promotion of science, as well as the other members of the organizing committee. team meeting Tonio Professor Sugawara from kk, and all the others, you'll see if you go to the privacy seeking young, and all of the others listed, that you will see in our program about the symposium, really looking forward to all of you participating. And again, as Professor fortune just said, it's not merely a set of events this month, we're really trying to launch a set of conversations, interdisciplinary conversations, and projects around these themes of archives, education programs, and building capacity and specific places, and building relationships across projects. So thank you so much for participating in this symposium, and we look forward to meeting you again next Monday.

Nadine Tanio 1:23:34

Thank you.

Kim Fortun 1:23:36

Thanks to all who join us and I hope you'll join us again in the coming weeks. We really would appreciate your collaboration