2014 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Voices from Tohoku: 3.11 Oral Narrative Archive
| Project/Area Number |
26285116
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| Research Institution | Sophia University |
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Principal Investigator |
SLATER David 上智大学, 国際教養学部, 教授 (70296888)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
野宮 大志郎 上智大学, 総合グローバル学部, 教授 (20256085)
FAHY SANDR 上智大学, 国際教養学部, 助教 (70726702)
伊藤 毅 上智大学, 国際教養学部, 准教授 (10646863)
猿谷 弘江 上智大学, 総合人間科学部, 助教 (80726076)
木村 護郎クリストフ 上智大学, 外国語学部, 教授 (90348839)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
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| Keywords | Tohoku / Disaster / Disaster Anthropology / Oral Narrative / Social Movements / STS |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The project is progressing just as we had planned. In our original plan, we presented a research cycle with background research, data collection, data processing, and analysis. Throughout the whole cycle, we have been making presentations to scholarly audience in Japan and abroad. The data collection in the Tohoku is coming to a close, with only Fukushima remaining. The data processing for both Tohoku disaster (tohokukaranokoe.org) and for social movements (voicesofprotestjapan.org) are up and open the public; we are still in the process of working on the materials (transcriptions and translations), as well as improving the functionality and design of the websites themselves. As according to plan, our presentations have selected certain topics from our data to present to a different audiences in Japan and outside of Japan. Our goals is to get greater exposure for the project and to get important feedback for the quality and focus of the data. So far, we have presented on both the archive itself and the content of the Tohoku data. We will use this feedback in order to target and write more scholarly articles. In addition, we have also been able to publish some of the articles, mostly about the innovations of the archives itself, its creation and its use--evidently, this is more unusual than we had thought.
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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
Last year has been very productive in all of our sub-projects with good progress to report in each. Overall, the importance of the archive as a tool of data collection, scholarly dissemination and community outreach has worked very well. 1. Our first sub-project, Oral Narrative Research (聴学 or オーラルヒストリー) focused mainly on Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, has proven to be both a methodological and scholarly interest. Our innovative uses of narrative allow us to understand the community ethno-historical background and life histories of rural life over the past 20 years (narratives of life before 3.11), the immediate context of disaster. We are now starting to do more linguistic analysis on the oral narratives as a performative genre in their own right. 2. Disaster Anthropology 災害の人類学is a key focus in our study of response to vulnerability in terms of both natural and man-made hazards, or what is called a “political-ecological” approach. 3. Science, Technology, Society (STS) 科学技術社会論 subproject has worked to college data on food safety and community rebuilding plans as we explore the relationships between "expert" and layman's knowledge. 4. Social Movements 社会運動 research has progressed even more than we had imagined. We have captured not only community rebuilding and food safety social movements, but also increased activism by young people, including college students.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
This year we will shift focus from data collection to data processing, as outlined in the project proposal.
DAT COLLECTION: We will not be collecting more interviews from Iwata and Miyagi, and interviews that we do collect from Fukushima will be limited to evacuee populations (非難）and those more involved in social movements. We will also be collecting more data for the STS subproject, but more survey and scientific information, rather than full oral narrative video interviews. On the other hand, we will increase the oral narrative data collected from Tokyo and Kanto that has to do with the social movements sub-project. In ways that we did not fully expect, this is proving to be a very deep and important source of data. More importantly, we have found that the techniques and methods (video oral narrative) that we have refined in Tohoku are proving to be equally useful in the urban activist movements, and giving a focus on the personal and narrative quality is the missing in much social movement research in the US and Europe.
DATA PROCESSING. We have collected more hours of data than we had expected, almost 500 hours, which increases the time and money we need to spend on transcription of all of this material and the somewhat slower task of translating it into English. We also need to spend more time on the formal properties of the archive--making information systematic across all categories. Finally, the high amount of attention that our website has received almost forces us to up the level of professional and scholarly front, visuals and the ease of use.
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| Causes of Carryover |
26年度の秋学期の終了に伴って２月以降に発注した翻訳のうち、３月中に納品及び支払いが生じる可能性のあるテープ起こし及び翻訳が大量にあったため、その費用としての予算を組んでいたが、結果的に４月以降の納品となったものが多かったため、次年度使用額が発生した。
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
上記理由により、26年度中に発注したが、納品及び支払いが27年度となったテープ起こし及び翻訳料の支払いに使用予定。
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