Arianna Tae Cimarosti

This project proposes an ethnographic study of post-disaster recovery in Arahama, Sendai—a coastal district devastated by the 2011 Northeastern Japan tsunami. Centering on the ethnographic concept of fukkō (recovery+), I ask how scientific experts, policymakers, and residents differently imagine and practice which values, communities, and environments are worth sustaining. My research shifts the analysis from recovery as a technocratic return to the past to recovery+, understood as a contested, future-making process shaped by intersecting scales: from Japan’s use of science diplomacy to elevate global standing and shape international disaster management, to the improvisational practices of aging residents crafting everyday forms of continuity in precarious environments. Bridging environmental and political anthropology, theories of value, and critical disability studies, my project foregrounds the entanglements of knowledge production and value-making through diverse practices—scientific approaches to disaster, policy planning, and embodied affordances. Twelve months of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival research, visual analysis, and collaborative creative methods will allow this study to trace recovery+ across both “major” and “minor” scales, offering new insights into the politics of value, the forgotten history of disaster science and “minor” projects of world-making, while reimagining ethnographic accountability through accessible and reciprocal forms of knowledge production.