EVENT

Tuesday, 22 April, 14:30–16:00 JST

From "Being about Something to Being for Somebody" is the memorable title of Stephen Weil's contribution to the 1999 Daedalus volume on American Museums. Though decades old and not without challenges, the phrase continues to resonate within the museum field. In many ways it encapsulates the ways in which institutions have changed from privileging curator-defined information and institution-defined goals to promoting the visitor's experience and the broader community.
In her talk, Leslie Bedford, a longtime museum practitioner and professor of museum studies, will explore the meaning of Weil's phrase and how it has been implemented by museums, including those she has visited in Japan. Her talk will include a discussion of the online conversations she is facilitating with Japanese museum professionals and academics. And finally, she will raise the question of what "visitor centered" can mean today and in the future.

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 15:00-16:30 JST

Carbon and nature markets are struggling with low trust, high costs, and limited scale—falling far short of what’s needed. In this lecture, Professor Weder di Mauro presents a new market design co-developed with Estelle Cantillon and Eric F. Lambin. Jurisdictions offer large-scale projects; investors buy shares that yield carbon and biodiversity “dividends” without conferring land ownership. Market prices reveal demand and support liquidity. Compared to credit-based systems, this approach cuts costs, boosts credibility, and supports long-term commitments. It tackles the core problems holding back today’s markets—and offers a credible path to scale with real environmental impact.

Thursday, 8 May, 10:30–12:00 JST

World literature has been a reality since at least the nineteenth century. Texts travel across continents and cultures, translated from every language, taught in universities worldwide, and forming an emerging global canon. Never before have we been so free to read whatever we wish, from anywhere. Or so it seems. But is this true freedom, or merely a comforting illusion? What are the boundaries of this seemingly limitless literary exchange? This talk aims to explore those limits and propose a new approach to literature—a different way of reading texts, one that is either entirely new or, perhaps, simply old and forgotten. Welcome to the world library!

Tuesday, 13 June 2023, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Climate change, industrial development, and population growth continuously increase the need for freshwater worldwide. Unconventional wastewater and saline sources must be tapped to reduce the stress on natural resources. However, producing freshwater from unconventional streams requires significantly more energy than traditional ways. While energy needs will always be high, innovative methods will rely on renewable energy, reduce the process complexity, and increase the socio-economic feasibility of desalination. This lecture discusses challenges and opportunities of these methods and the water-energy nexus.

Monday, 5 June 2023, 5:00 - 7:00pm JST

Plastic is essential for so many of the things we value in today’s world. But excessive and unplanned use of plastic worsens the conditions driving climate change and threatens the land, the seas and the lives of animals and humans.

Speakers on this panel will highlight issues including the chemical challenges plastic poses for the environment; the lives of waste-pickers who minimize the harm caused by discarded plastic; the science and economics confronting small-scale, local reuse of plastic; government mechanisms to coordinate the containment of plastic; and the dangers to animals and humans of micro-plastics in diverse forms.

Friday, 2 June 2023, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm JST

The Anthropocene—the geological era dominated by human activities—is often associated with the climate change, ecological crisis, the sixth extinction, etc., or in brief, with an apocalyptic end. The recent acceleration of digital technology added more strength to the eschatological imagination which underlines the philosophy of history in the past centuries. In this sense, the Anthropocene is posed as a problem of modernity and it consequently calls for a new movement of overcoming modernity, which we can identify with the recent efforts of anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Bruno Latour among others, who want to undo the modern concept of nature. This talk will address this impasse of modernity and introduce what I call technodiversity as a response.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 4:00-5:30PM

The use of language in public space is an important indicator of identity, which shows how languages are valued in a given community in both practical and symbolic manners. In this workshop, we will explore how identity is visually manifested in the physical and digital landscapes through the examination of the language of public signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, and so on.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 3:00 - 4:00 pm (JST)

This talk deals with two interrelated phenomena in Japanese writing practices: (1) the integration of loanwords and (2) the romanization of Japanese vocabulary. I will argue that the two phenomena are in fact complementary, resulting in a high degree of hybridity between what is native and what is foreign.

Thursday, 25 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

International human rights law guarantees a ‘right to participate in and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications’. The lecture will explain why the so-called ‘right to science’ has largely stayed inactive, and what its recently-rekindled participatory dimension implies for its right-holders and duty-bearers. It proposes to interpret the right to science as a public good to help revise the predominant approach to science as an individual, ahistorical and acultural enterprise, and reverse the trend towards its privatization and commodification.

Monday, 22 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

Professor Andrew Gordon is studying the public history of industrial heritage, beginning with the UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Sites of Japan’s industrial revolution. He is also interested in sites of industrial heritage which have not been (and probably will not be) nominated to UNESCO. His talk will focus on two such sites. One is old and famous: the Ashio Copper Mine and Refinery. Another is Japan’s newest “industrial heritage site”: the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Monday, 15 May 2023, 5:00-6:30 pm

The European Union is about to implement the world’s first carbon border adjustment mechanism: a charge on imports from countries with lower carbon prices. Advocates see this as a major advance in the fight against climate change. Opponents see it as opening the door to protectionism. What are the arguments and evidence? Should other countries do the same?

Tuesday, 25 April 2023 4:00-5:30 pm

Increases in computer power and computational tools have transformed economic research, as well as many other sciences. This talk will discuss the ways that growing computer power has changed economics and finance, and how recent developments such as deep learning, artificial intelligence and machine learning might transform it in the future.

Saturday, 22 April 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm (Doors open: 3:30 pm)

During the last 122 years, almost 1000 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Laureates and their great achievements are a tremendous source of inspiration, including for cancer research aiming at understanding why and how we get cancer, and how it can be treated, which is the theme of the presentation.

Wednesday, 19 April 2023, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm JST

Is our language inundated by loanwords? Or is it being enriched by absorbing foreign vocabulary? We often hear such discussions in contemporary Japan. Loanwords and Japanese Identity: Inundating or Absorbed? explores the relationship between language and identity through an examination of public attitudes towards lexical borrowing in the Japanese language.

Monday, 17 April 2023, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm (JST)

The embedded notion of the inseparable relationship between the nation, the language, and the people has shaped Japan’s language policy. In this talk, Dr.Kayoko Hashimoto (The University of Queensland) discusses how learners’ identity has been constructed in so-called “English education” in Japan and how learners’ identity has been assumed in the promotion of Japanese language teaching overseas.