Join EcoGovLab in celebrating Ina Kim’s successful dissertation defense. Kim’s dissertation, entitled “Unnatural Environment: Data, Politics, and Ecological Imaginaries in Post-Nuclear Japan” investigated civic data processes in post-Fukushima Japan. She conducted fieldwork from November 2021 to October 2022 at 20 citizen radiation detection labs. Her questions centered on what motivates activists running the labs to continue their activities even as public interest wanes; how the labs’ practices challenge the naturalization of post-disaster radiation exposure; and how posthuman ecological imaginaries represent environmental injustice through radiation detection data. Her work suggests that, in an era of nuclear power, bodily constituents like teeth are an archive of the relationship between the body and radiation. Data produced by citizen radiation detection labs make visible a longer history of environmental violence in human and more-than-human bodies: irradiation in human bodies stemming from earlier nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. Kim’s dissertation shows that, for activists and their interlocutors, the archive of embodied radiation invites rethinking what “normal bodies” look like in a post-nuclear society.
