Thinking Material:

Kimberley Anh Thomas is an environmental social scientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. She takes a political ecology approach to questions about environmental justice, human vulnerability to hazards, and the multi-scalar politics of resource governance in South and Southeast Asia. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Global Environmental Change, Climate and Development, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geopolitics, and WIREs Climate Change and has been supported through funding by the Fulbright Foundation, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Institute for Human Geography.

Gerald Figal is professor of History and Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, a study of how traditional folk beliefs and a wider discourse on the mysterious and supernatural were variously reconfigured in the context of Japan’s modernization, and Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa, an examination of tensions between tourism and war memorialization in postwar Okinawa. He currently has two ongoing projects: one deals with the business, production, and product of Okinawan, mainland Japanese, and American photography of Okinawa and its people; the other is a history and contemporary cultural analysis of tetrapods—concrete coastal armor units—on Japan’s coastline and in the Japanese public imagination. Both projects assure that he will be able to spend much time near the ocean in the foreseeable future.

Hannah Shepherd is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. Her teaching and research interests focus on modern Japan and its colonial empire, with an emphasis on the connected twentieth-century histories of imperial expansion, urban growth, and movement of peoples between Japan and Korea. Her current book project, Cities into Empire: Fukuoka, Pusan, and Japan’s Imperial Urbanization 1876-1953, focuses on two cities on either side of an imperial border.

Duncan McDuie-Ra is professor of urban sociology at the University of Newcastle with an interest in urban culture, urban objects, urban infrastructure,urban technology, urban media and urban memoryscapes. McDuie-Ra’s monographs include: Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2021); Skateboard Video: Archiving the City from Below (Springer, 2021); Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism and Urbanism in Dimapur (co-authored with Dolly Kikon, Oxford Univ Press, 2020) Borderland City in New India: Frontier to gateway (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2016), and Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, refuge and retail (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2012). Recent work has appeared in the journals: Modern Asian Studies, Political Geography, Memory Studies, Emotion Space and Society, Geographical Journal, Area, and Development & Change.