Teach3.11 + COVID-19 is a collective of educators, researchers, artists, students and survivors spanning disciplinary and linguistic boundaries who study and teach about disasters. Our collaborative process encourages empathetic inquiry into the past, and shares those stories for the future.

 

Editors

Kristina Buhrman, Yeonsil Kang, Lisa Onaga, Chelsea Szendi Schieder

Digital Content Curator

Grace Teo

Multimedia Editor

Nathaniel M. Smith

Nanyang Technological University Faculty Liaison

Michael Stanley-Baker

Editorial Team

Shoan Yin Cheung, Jadie Hokuala Iijima Geil, Chihyung Jeon, Yuxin Liu, Teru Miyake, Anto Mohsin, Maika Nakao, Rita Padawangi, Ghada Salama, Ryuma Shineha, Fiona Williamson

Technical Support

Library, Nanyang Technological University

Emeritus

Sulfikar Amir, Chris Courtney, Christian Dimmer, Ashanti Shih, Zachary Tan, Honghong Tinn (co-founding editor), Tyson Vaughan (co-founding editor), Shih Lin Loh

Logo design

Wiebke Weitzmann, Ashanti Shih, Audrey Tay Aik Ling

The three figures depicted in the Teach311 logo are connected by different waves (oceanic, seismic, and radiation) that play a significant role in how the triple disasters of Japan have been been experienced and understood. The redesigned Teach311 + COVID-19 Collective logo takes these figures and fits them amidst the spike proteins that have become iconic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the novel coronavirus that led to a global pandemic disaster in 2020.

Biosketches

Kristina Buhrman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the Florida State University. She received her Ph.D from the Department of History at the University of Southern California with the dissertation “The Stars and the State: Astronomy, Astrology, and the Politics of Natural Knowledge in Early Medieval Japan” (2012). Her research is on the interpretation of nature, particularly natural disasters, in premodern Japan, a topic that combines the history of science with political history and the history of religions. She lends Teach 3.11 her expertise and interest in the history of disasters in Japan before the modern period. Aside from her premodern focus, she is interested in the modern interaction between East Asian religions and science, and in collaborations between historians and scientists in making risk assessments. Kristina graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Linguistics with a concentration in Cognitive Studies, and before entering her Ph.D. program she worked as a website support specialist for the Cornell University Libraries.

Shoan Yin Cheung is a Ph.D. candidate in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. She is an anthropologist of contemporary Japan, with special interest in gender, technology, and social change. Her current work, on the reproductive politics of the birth control pill in Japan, was funded by a 2017 National Science Foundation research grant.

Jadie Hokuala Iijima Geil is a bachelor student of the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University, currently studying abroad at the Free University of Berlin. She is interested in alternative forms of housing conducive to ecological and communal sustainability.

Chihyung Jeon teaches science and technology studies (STS) at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He handles Korean language materials for Teach 3.11. Inspired by Teach 3.11, Jeon launched Teach Sewol (http://teachsewol.org), which provides documents, photos, and educational materials about the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. He is also the editor-in-chief at the Journal of Science and Technology Studies published by the Korean STS Association.

Yeonsil Kang is a visiting assistant professor at the Department of History, Drexel University. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Science, Technology, and Policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2017. Her research interests are the history of envirotech in East Asia and disasters in the past and present. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Mineral Time, Bodily Time: Asbestos, Slow Disaster, and Toxic Politics in South Korea.

Yuxin Liu is an MA student of Computational Sciences at Free University of Berlin. Her work has centred around the penetration process of the rapamycin into the human skin, in particular the impact of solvent and time on the penetration efficiency.

Anto Mohsin is assistant professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. He’s also an affiliated faculty member of Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture Program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He teaches introductory and upper level courses in Science and Technology Studies (STS), an interdisciplinary field examining science and technology critically in their broader sociopolitical contexts. Mohsin received his PhD in STS from Cornell University. Mohsin’s teaching and research interests include environmental studies, energy studies (electricity especially), and disaster studies, examining topics in these areas using an STS perspective. 

Teru Miyake is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University.  His area of specialty is the philosophy of science, and his dissertation was about a special kind of scientific problem—that of trying to acquire knowledge about systems to which we have limited access. He compared different examples of this problem across centuries. One example of this type of problem focused on astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which brought him to study the work of Kepler and Newton. Another example concerns contemporary seismology, where the aim of seismologists is to acquire detailed knowledge about the interior of the earth from observations of seismic waves at the surface. Teru is particularly interested in how scientific theories and models are used in the exploration of systems that cannot be accessed directly. Before going into philosophy, he got a B.S. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology, and lived for many years in Japan, working as an engineer and later as a freelance translator.

Maika Nakao is an Assistant Professor at Nagasaki University. She received her Ph.D. in history of science from the University of Tokyo (2015). She is the author of two books,『核の誘惑: 戦前日本の科学文化と「原子力ユートピア」の出現』[Allure of Nuclear: Science Culture in Prewar Japan and the Emergence of “Atomic Utopia”]  (Keisō Shōbō, 2015) and『科学者と魔法使いの弟子ー科学と非科学の境界ー』[Scientists and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Border between Science and Non-Science] (Seidosha, 2019). She has produced the documentary film Memories of the Kyoto Cyclotron which was awarded a prize at the 50th Science and Technology Film/Video Festival (2009). She is currently working on the history of radiation exposure and atomic bomb casualties.

Lisa Onaga is a co-founder of Teach 3.11, a collaborative online educational space that helps teachers, students, and scholars locate, produce, and share collective wisdom about disasters through study of the history of science and technology in Asia. Lisa serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Dept. III: Artifacts · Action · Knowledge). Prior to moving to the MPIWG in 2017, she was an assistant professor in the History Program at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a postdoctoral fellow with the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics/D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia. Her analysis of the history of silkworm genetics involving the Tōhoku region of Japan, and her experience as a survivor of the Kobe ’95 earthquake, have informed her historical and S&TS research on science in East Asia that has been featured in journals such as positions: asia critique, Technology and Culture, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Journal for the History of Biology. From 2019, she serves as an Associate Editor for History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. Her book, Cocoon Cultures: An Entanglement of Biology and Silk in Japan since 1840, is under contract with Duke University Press.

Rita Padawangi is a Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Previously, she was Senior Research Fellow of the Asian Urbanisms cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS). She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Loyola University Chicago, where she was also a Fulbright Scholar for her master of arts studies. She holds a bachelor of architecture degree from the Parahyangan Catholic University. Her research interests include the sociology of architecture and participatory urban development. She is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia (2019) and co-editor of Cities in Asia by and for the People (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

Ghada Salama is an Instructional Associate Professor in the Chemical Engineering program at Texas A&M at Qatar. She feels a strong bond with all things Asia especially South East Asia where she grew up and would love to contribute to Teach 3.11.org.

Nathaniel M. Smith is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona with research interests in political anthropology and nationalism, urban studies, and sound and visual anthropology. He is currently affiliated at Waseda University as a Japan Foundation fellow.

Michael Stanley-Baker is an assistant professor in History at the School of Humanities, and as medical humanities lead at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. in medical history from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, as well as a clinical degree in Chinese medicine.  He researches comparative medical cultures in China and Asia more widely in early imperial China and today, with a focus on Daoism and medicine, as well as the migration of medicines across cultures. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (2020), and Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations. His forthcoming monograph, Doctors, Daoists and Demons: Situating Medicine and Religion in Early Imperial China examines the emergence of religion and medicine as related cultural categories in early imperial China. He uses multi-disciplinary approaches, drawing from Sinology, medical history, religious studies and digital humanities. He has also published a database of Chinese Buddhist, Daoist and medical source texts, DAOBUDMED6D. Dr. Stanley-Baker serves as vice-president of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine.

Chelsea Szendi Schieder is a historian of contemporary Japan and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Her book, Co-Ed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left, is forthcoming on Duke University Press.

Ryuma Shineha is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Seijo University. He previously held an assistant professorship at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (“Science and Society” group). He studies media discourses, communication, and public policy concerning the life sciences in Japan. He received his Ph.D. on this theme from Kyoto University in 2011. His published works on this theme include “Public engagement in Japanese policy-making: a history of the genetically modified organisms debate” (New Genetics and Society, vol. 28-2, 2009). Currently, he is investigating the social structures, media discourses, and the public interest on issues around 3.11 with collaborating researchers Mikihito Tanaka (Waseda University), Ekou Yagi and Masaki Nakamura (both of Osaka University). Their current work on  3.11 is published in Japanese as the two books, The Disaster Vulnerable and the Information Vulnerable: What was overlooked after 3.11? (災害弱者と情報弱者: ３・１１後、何が見過ごされたのか) (Chikuma-Press) and Science and Politics after the Disaster of March 11 in Japan (ポスト3.11の科学と政治) (Nakanishiya Press).

Grace Teo is an MA student with the History Programme at Nanyang Technological University. As an extension of her interests in the histories of time standardization, she is currently completing her graduate thesis on the progression of time policing in nineteenth-century colonial Singapore. She holds an interest in the representations of hibakusha experience and memory in autobiographical and fictional works

Fiona Williamson is an Assistant Professor in Science, Technology and Society at Singapore Management University; Associate Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Associate Fellow at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of East Anglia in 2009. Her research interests span the environmental and climatic history of former British colonies in Asia and the history of science, especially meteorology. She is currently working on the history of urban heat in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as a number of multi-disciplinary projects aimed at reconstructing past nature-induced disasters.

Teach311.org is produced in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Artifacts, Action, Knowledge) and Nanyang Technological University-Singapore. It began in 2011 as a joint project of the Forum for the History of Science in Asia and the Society for the History of Technology Asia Network.