Bridget Love is a cultural anthropologist and lecturer in expository writing at the University of Oklahoma. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan. At the Rachel Carson Center, she is completing the book manuscript Places at their Limits: The Problem of Sustainability in Rural Japan. The culmination of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a depopulating and aging region of rural northeastern Japan, her manuscript explores anxieties over environmental and demographic sustainability in recessionary Japan. Her research has been funded by grants from Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Japan Foundation. In the wake of Japan’s March 11 disasters, she is beginning a new ethnographic project on volunteer clean-up and recovery efforts on the coast of Iwate in order to examine civic activism and disaster in twenty-first century Japan.
RCC Research Project: Places at their Limits: The Problem of Sustainability in Rural Japan (pdf, 8 KB)
Film Interview with Bridget Love
Selected Publications:
- “Treasure Hunts in Rural Japan: Place-making at the Limits of Sustainability” (forthcoming)
- “Mountain Vegetables and the Politics of Local Flavor in Regional Japan.” In Past and Present in Japanese Foodways. Edited by Eric Rath and Stephanie Assman, 330-376. Bloomington, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
- “Fraught Fieldsites: Community Decline and Heritage Food Revival in Japan.” In Politics and Pitfalls of Japan Anthropology, Edited by Jennifer Robertson, 541-560. London: Routledge, 2009. [First published in Critical Asian Studies 39,4 (2007): 541-558.]
