Andrew Littlejohn

ANDREW LITTLEJOHN, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to assist research and writing on “After the Flood: Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan.” After the 2011 tsunami, the Japanese state proposed to protect the northeastern Sanriku Coast by building new safety infrastructures. However, many survivors resisted these. The book explores why people who experienced disaster would reject things that should prevent it from happening again. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that neither modernist safety infrastructures nor bottom-up alternatives maintain or protect existing spaces and subjects. Both are world-building devices shaping what those spaces and subjects are, could, or should be; how they should (and should not) relate; and which among them exercises or is subject to power.