Ina Kim
Graduate Student
Ina Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on ecological imaginary, data ethnography, nuclear disaster, medical anthropology, Japan, and East Asia.
Her doctoral project, Unnatural Environment: Data, Politics, and Ecological Imaginary in Post-Nuclear Japan, explores the political subjectivity and posthuman environmental ethics of citizen radiation detection labs in post-Fukushima Japan. In examining multilayered data practices of citizen labs, she argues that neoliberal nuclear industry’s normalization of radiation contamination in the environment and human and more-than-human bodies is challenged by ecological imaginary and less anthropocentric perspectives. For her further research, she attends to the infrastructural imaginary of “green” villages in Japan and energy policies in East Asian countries.
She participates in the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 Project and the COVID-19 and Data Group as a subgroup of the project. She delves into COVID-19 data practices and the relationships among multiple data actors, including the government, research institutions, media, and citizen scientists in Japan and South Korea. She is also interested in how different citizen data platforms have been gaining scientific and political authority in Japan, the U.S., and South Korea during the pandemic.