TGSW2015 Abstracts.Pdf
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Kyosuke Nagata President University of Tsukuba Dear Colleagues and Friends It is my distinct pleasure to welcome everyone to Tsukuba Global Science Week (TGSW) 2015, now for the 6th year running. The history of the University of Tsukuba extends back 143 years when it was founded by the Meiji government as Japan’s fi rst institution of higher education and premier Normal School. A little over forty years ago in October 1973, our university was relocated from Tokyo to Tsukuba City where it was reborn as a comprehensive institution of higher education. Since its establishment, the University of Tsukuba has aimed for interdisciplinary education and research and to be a university open to society and the world. In accordance with these principles, we are delighted to host TGSW once again, which gathers together a number of participants not only from a diverse range of academic fi elds, but also from many different countries. What started out as an event with a single academic discipline, TGSW 2015 now offers sessions from a wide variety of fi elds ranging from hard sciences to humanities with prominent researchers from over 40 different countries. One of the highlights of this year’s TGSW is a session on “Engagement in the Olympic and Paralympic Movement,” with keynote speech by Mr. Nick Fuller (IPC), along with presentations and discussions bearing on the future and legacies of the movement with contributions from representatives of the Special Needs Education School for the Physically Challenged, International Paralympic Committee, University of Bordeaux, and AISTS, among many others. The session is particularly fi tting for this occasion, not only because Tokyo has been chosen as the venue for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, but also because we are one of the world’s premier research institutes for sports science and sports medicine with over 60 Olympic medalists. 4 TGSW is a show case of world class researches carried out by our faculty members jointly with fellow scientists throughout the globe, including those associated with public and quasi- public institutions based in Tsukuba Science City and our partner universities outside Japan. But TGSW is more than that. The human race is now facing a range of global challenges – food crisis, energy issues, environmental risks, never-ending wars, poverty, and the list goes on. In order to proceed towards their solutions, the greater community of scientists, regardless of their areas of specialty, citizenship, ethnicity, gender, faith, and world views, must get together and collaborate closely. TGSW can serve as an invaluable forum for exchanging views on how to meet those challenges in a way that defi es all kinds of traditionally conceived barriers. I would like to thank all of you for your participation and sincerely hope that you will enjoy this three-day event. I look forward to meeting with you during the week to further strengthen our ties for more cooperation. 5 6 0 Opening Session Monday, September 28 Venue: Conference Room 300 Opening Session This session is to kick-start Tsukuba Global Science Week 2015. Professor Atsushi Suzuki of Kyushu University’s Medical Institute of Bioregulation, who is one of the 11th (FY2014) JSPS PRIZE Awardees, will be the keynote speaker. MC: Takeshi Hirose, University of Tsukuba Kyosuke Nagata University of Tsukuba 8:45-8:55 Opening Remarks Representative from CAO Cabinet Offi ce, Government of Japan 8:55-9:00 Ceremonial Address Ministry of Education, Culture, Representative from MEXT Sports, Science and Technology 9:00-9:05 - Japan Ceremonial Address Atsushi Suzuki Kyushu University 9:05-9:35 Keynote Address: A Challenge to Medical Innovation from Biological Aspects 9:35-9:55 Photo Session 7 NOTE 8 1 Human Scales and Subjectivities Tuesday, September 29 Venue: Conference Room 304 Human Scales and Subjectivities How can we assess the ways in which humans (i.e., concerned persons, bystanders, experts, activists, administrators, and politicians) conceptualize the problems of the world? In this session, we will present concrete cases ethnographically and discuss them in a cross-disciplinary way. Session Organizers: Yasushi Uchiyamada and Shuhei Kimura Part One Chair: TBA, University of Tsukuba Yasushi Uchiyamada University of Tsukuba 9:00-9:10 Opening remarks Shuhei Kimura University of Tsukuba 9:10-9:50 On the scales to measure disaster reconstruction David Spraig NIAES 9:55-10:35 Trying to see the obvious: Measurement, categorization, and decision making based on human perceptions of natural variation Coffee break Valerie Olson University of California, Irvine 10:50-11:30 Subjects of the system: making humans to scale in U.S. environmental science and technology Discussion 11:35-12:00 Discussants: Toshihiro Kameda (University of Tsukuba), TBA Part Two Chair: TBA, University of Tsukuba Junko Teruyama University of Tsukuba 13:15-13:55 Speaking of how well I speak: personal evaluation of communication skills among autistic individuals Grant Jun Otsuki University of Tsukuba 14:00-14:40 The human as life or as communication Coffee break Gergely Mohácsi Osaka University 14:55-15:35 Pharmaceutical Gardens: On scaling life and anthropology through bioprospecting medicinal plants in Vietnam Yasushi Uchiayamada University of Tsukuba 15:40-16:20 Beyond perception of the world: Being in the world after the nuclear accident Discussion 16:25-16:50 Discussants: Ryosuke Ohniwa (University of Tsukuba), TBA 16:55-17:15 Roundtable 9 1-3 Subjects of the system: Making humans to scale in U.S. environmental science and technology Valerie A. Olson Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine This paper uses anthropological fi eldwork in U.S. astronautics, marine ecosystem science, and terrestrial ecosystem science to examine the making of “systems subjectivity” at the levels of rhetoric, practice, and governance. Based on data from a total of ten years of ethnographic data collection within government research and development facilities, research institutions, and private companies, the paper examines how experts recast the human as a “system” or “subsystem” of larger environmental or ecological systems, thereby formalizing new authoritative forms of knowledge about human/environment interfaces, human/non- human relations, and ecosystem management across extreme scales. While social scientists continue to use and reject “systems thinking” and “systems theory” as analytic tools the past decades, there remains little ethnographic work specifi cally aimed at examining “system” as an historical and changing object of culture and practice. This leaves open the question of how contemporary experts in elite settings use the “system” concept in everyday technical, scientifi c, and political practices – including how experts perceive themselves and “the human” as systemic subjects. This paper treats “system” as an ethnographic object in order to track how it operates as a technology of relational and scalar ordering that takes on contingent, shared, and contested manifestations in particular social settings. 10 1-5 The human as life or as communication Grant Jun Otsuki University of Tsukuba How might we view human beings differently if we suspend the assumption that humans are a form of life? In this paper, I present fi ndings from an ethnographic study of scientists and engineers in a fi eld I call “Human-Centered Technology” (HCT) in Japan who develop technologies to interface humans and machines. The objective of HCT is to create technologies that can make humans more comfortable, secure, and able to adapt to increasingly complex societies. I argue that these researchers do not assume that the human is a form of life, but a form of communication. I show how when these researchers suspend the assumption that “life” defi nes human existence, they become able to articulate the challenges that complex technologies pose to human society on different scales. This reveals to them new avenues for technologies to intervene in and improve human life. I support this argument with examples showing that (a) HCT researchers view the human as a system of communication, not a form of life; (b) when the assumption that human is life is reintroduced, the researchers reproduce a conservative vision of society that obscures the infl uence of social and political structures in human life, and (c) when they suspend the assumption of life, they imagine scales of human existence through which conservative visions of society may be challenged. 11 1-6 Pharmaceutical gardens: On scaling life and anthropology through bioprospecting medicinal plants in Vietnam Gergely Mohácsi Osaka University While most of the “traditional” knowledge of medicinal plants in Vietnam and Japan derive from classic texts of Chinese medicine, their cultivation, preparation and prescription follow different scales—from herbal gardens in quasi-socialist cooperatives, to Japanese extracts or the universal human body of biochemistry—some of which do not necessarily nest neatly in each other. The alterity of Vietnamese and/or Chinese medical traditions, and scientifi c explanations depends on the the practices of scaling in which they deploy themselves: the industrial production of extracts that target global health problems; the micropropagation of engendered species in a laboratory; or the sampling of plants across the country. One site of these sampling activities that are the topic of this presentation is a garden—which is actually two gardens—in Đồng Nai province, east of Ho Chi Minh City in Southern Vietnam. Drawing on my fi eldwork with molecular biologists and a traditional Vietnamese doctor who cultivates the gardens, I will explore the methodological usefulness of scaling against the backdrop of recent debates on ontological multiplicities in anthropology and science studies. 12 1-7 Beyond perception of the world: Being in the world after the nuclear accident Yasushi Uchiyamada University of Tsukuba The process of “reconstructions” in Fukushima is extremely slow as compared to those in the Sanriku coast to the north. The slowness of the process indicates the nature of the accident.