Peter Wynn Kirby, Ph.D., an environmental specialist and waste ethnographer in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Kirby will discuss “Smuggling, Burning, Burying, Shredding, Knowing: Varieties of Waste Work in East Asia.” His research focuses on toxic waste and nuclear risk in Japan – notably in the irradiated aftermath of the 2011 tsunami disaster in Tohoku – and scrutinizes the cultural underpinnings of environmental attitudes, from popular culture to conceptions of purity and pollution. He also researches transnational flows of waste and the resulting toxic fallout in China and elsewhere in East Asia (and beyond).
His presentation is part of the 2015-2016 Sagan National Colloquium speaker series, “The Place of Waste:Exploring Asian and Western Perspectives on Waste, Sustainability, and Environment.”