How does radiation function as evidence? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Fukushima, Japan site of the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, this talk examines how radiation is activated, contested, and suppressed in discourse across a range of sites—museum exhibits, government documents, promotional materials, and community storytelling. I argue that radiation is never simply a quantity but a shifting, malleable form of evidence whose meaning is always measured against competing values of safety, economy, and responsibility. Tracing radiation's "longlives," "futurelives," and "nonlives," I show how its evidentiary slipperiness is strategically recruited—to justify redevelopment, foreclose accountability, and underwrite Japan's accelerating return to nuclear power fifteen years after the triple disaster.

Dr Judit Kroo is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, whose research sits at the intersection of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, examining how communities in Japan and elsewhere use language to navigate precarity, construct belonging, and remake social life under conditions of ongoing disaster. She completed her PhD at Stanford University and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Oxford, and has previously taught at Arizona State University and Vassar College in the United States. Her work has published in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language and Communication and Multilingua and she has co-edited a volume Linguistic Tactics and Strategies of Marginalization in Japanese. She is currently Book Review Editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1