| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Much time has been devoted to: 1) An overview of the literature addressing Law and the Anthropocene, with a focus on critical environmental law scholarship; 2) The development, at the University of Tokyo (Komaba) of new syllabi articulated around transdisciplinary case- and problem-based education in the environmental field of knowledge, at the interface of Environmental Sciences and Environmental Humanities; 3) Ongoing group discussions, through Tokyo-based working seminars and faculty development activities, to clarify the research questions raised last year, namely: a) Is it best to address internationalisation of university education within the academic context of the disciplines or outside these discourse communities; b) How is the 'Anthropocene' narrative progressively permeating Legal Studies?; c) How could environmental leadership capacity building in higher education and transdisciplinary case-based education deal with ‘legal reasoning in context’ (raisonnement juridique en situation) as a key competence?; 4) I have finalised a peer-review article on the competence-based approach to legal education (Ebisu, forthcoming 2018); 5) Presentations at conferences, including: a) ‘Terra Incognita: When Environmental Law Education Engages Beyond Its Home Discipline’, Japanese Studies and the Environmental Humanities, Workshop, Oxford U., Oct. 2017, Oxford; b) ‘Engaging the Teaching Place with the Anthropocene as a Boundary Object: A Case for Environmental Law Education in Post 3.11 Japan’, Workshop, French-Japanese Week on Disaster Risk Reduction, Oct. 2017, Tokyo.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
My research is progressing rather smoothly. I devoted more time than initially planned to the reflection about the growing importance of a narrative such as the 'Anthropocene' for the development of environmental legal studies and pedagogies in multi- and interdisciplinary university frameworks. I have been actively engaged in the participation into and the preparation of several workshops overseas addressing the development of critical environmental law scholarship and the possibility to develop related innovative teaching methods (situational case studies, problem-based learning, role-play simulations).
As a result, the research trip (Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore) I was planning to gather complementary information concerning the possibility of creating a case study database on a regional basis and the ‘good practices’ developed so far in clinical legal education through collaborations existing in and between these jurisdictions, had to be delayed. This research trip will take place later this year.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I will present at the following conferences and workshops: a) 'Engaging the Teaching Place with the Anthropocene: Environmental Governance and Disaster STS Education Through Simul-Action', Transnational STS, Annual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Sept. 2018, Sydney, Australia (single-author paper refereed, proposal accepted); b) 'The Teaching and Learning of STS in an International Context', with B. Dalgliesh, Transnational STS, Annual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Sept. 2018, Sydney, Australia (co-authored paper refereed, proposal accepted); c) 'Climate Change Law Education in Post-Fukushima Japan and the Progressive Building of a Cross-Disciplinary Anthropocene Curriculum', Conference on Teaching and Learning in Law, Directions in Legal Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), 3 June 2018, Hong Kong, China (single-author refereed paper, proposal accepted); d) 'How Might We Train the ‘Gaian Generation’ of Environmental Learners? Critical Environmental Law As Pedagogy and the Emergent Anthropocene Curriculum', Workshop, Searching for Critical Environmental Law: Theories, Methods, Critics, 11 May 2018, Oxford Brookes U., Oxford, UK (single-author refereed paper, proposal accepted).
I plan one research trip in Singapore (which has been delayed) to gather complementary information concerning the possibility of creating a case study database on a regional basis, and will present the main features of my research project (consolidated findings) in two peer-reviewed articles in English.
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