Hiroko Kumaki

HIROKO KUMAKI, then a student at The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL was awarded funding in October 2016 to aid research on “Mobilizing the ‘Ecological’: Disaster Mental Health in Post-2011 Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster Japan,” supervised by Dr. Michael Fisch. The funding supported 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork on ongoing disaster mental health interventions in areas affected by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan. The research involved participant observation and interviews with disaster mental health care providers and residents who receive care; visits to clinics, organizations, and universities working in this area; and attendance at national and international conferences and meetings on the topic. The project investigated how disaster mental health has become a point of connection and contention about what consists of ‘healthy’ relationship between human and their post-disaster ecological environments. It examined the ways in which different actors mobilize knowledges and experiences of the ecological environment in order to configure ‘appropriate’ mental health responses to disasters, and how such responses in turn reconfigure the ways in which physical and psychological well-being becomes articulated and experienced by those who practice or become target of such care.