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Jun Mizukawa is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching span Japanese religions, environmental studies, media and mass communication, and Japanese literature. Her work addresses a broad spectrum of sociopolitical issues in a culturally nuanced and historically grounded context. Since 2019, she has conducted short-term and long-term ethnographic and archival research along Japan’s northeast coast focusing on experimental projects that aim to establish a more sustainable, site-specific, and animated engagement across species. She is currently developing a manuscript titled Spirited Ecology at the End of the World, which draws on fieldwork conducted in 2021–22 during her tenure as the sixteenth Hakuhōdō Japanese Research Fellow. The manuscript will explore culturally informed responses and mitigation strategies to natural disasters, ecologically grounded paradigms of living in the post-3.11 Japan, and potentials of ethnological imaginaries of the past and the future.
Since 2023, Mizukawa has also been part of a collaborative research project titled “Phytological Critique,” which received multiyear funding from The Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. Comprising an interdisciplinary group of scholars from anthropology, science and technology studies, cinema and media studies, literature, and philosophy, the group engages with the emerging field of plant studies and plant intelligence. In addition to her work on media and technology in Japan and the political ecology of the 3.11 disaster, Mizukawa is a regular contributor to a quarterly journal dedicated to the work of the Japanese poet Noriko Ibaragi.
RCC Research Project: Spirited Ecology at the End of the World
Selected Publications:
- with Michael Fisch. Beyond the Blue Fear: A Response to Stefan Helmreich’s A Book of Waves. University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.
- “Radical Clay at the Art Institute of Chicago” [Radical Clay@シカゴ美術館]. Ibaragi Noriko Techō 20 (2024): 21–23.
- “Real and Fake” [本物と偽物]. Ibaragi Noriko Techō 19 (2024): 26–27.
- “Spinach“ [ほうれん草]. Ibaragi Noriko Techō 18 (2023): 28–29.
- with Michael Fisch. “Reconstruction and Repetition: Concrete Sovereignty” [復興と回復：コンクリートの主権性]. Shinsaigaku 13 (2019): 19–24.
- “Reading ‘On the Go’: An Inquiry into the Tempos and Temporalities of the Cellphone Novel.” Japanese Studies 36, no. 1 (2016): 61–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371397.2016.1175295.