While I could not make it to the Festival of Scholars ENVS poster presentation, I have had the opportunity to peruse senior capstone DS sites. While doing so I found Kara Scherer’s site and her capstone on community disaster resiliency titled “Love Thy Neighbor (Or Know Them, at Least).” Kara’s work is very similar to my own interests, that of community, resiliency, and disaster. I have been working on my own disaster-related thesis prep regarding the 2011 Fukushima Triple Disaster.
I was not able to see Kara’s poster on her website, but reading her abstract and questions are helpful in better understanding how to construct my project. I have made many, many sets of framing and focus questions over the past few months but have so far been unable to fully (and realistically) encompass what I would like to research. Kara’s thesis not only created two questions that easily explained her project, but she was also able to focus her research on a useful and concrete app called Nextdoor. I think the type of connections Kara was looking at would be useful for me to think about when working on the theoretical framework I would use in my investigation of Japan’s 2011 earthquake.
Hannah Smay also had an interestingly connected thesis to my own, her’s titled “Unsettling Dreams: Contemporary Earthquake Literature from The Pacific Northwest and Japan.” Hannah looks at fictional work around earthquakes, one of which is focused on the 2011 earthquake. I am also interested in looking at literature around the earthquake, but I would be much more interested in primary source stories from survivors of the event, especially in relation to the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. I’m still working out my questions and possible methodologies, but it is helpful to see two related projects that could guide me in the right direction.