PhD candidate Shoko Yamada awarded the 2024 Nancy Abelmann Prize

PhD candidate Shoko Yamada’s paper, “Afterlife of Closure: Victimhood and Redress after Toxic Exposure in Japan,” received the 2024 Nancy Abelmann Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper from the Society for East Asian Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). 

The award committee described the paper: “Her critical historical perspective and long-term ethnographic lens shed new light on the politics of redress, innovatively approaching them through the lens of performativity and situating them within the larger context of post-War memory. In this way, Yamada’s work unpacks the complex aftermath of chronic illness and settlement agreements in the wake of toxic exposure from industrial pollution in the Jinzū river basin in Toyoma, Japan. Using sensitive ethnography and gripping prose, she demonstrates how so-called closures and settlements dramatize the tension between irreparable injury and the performance of finality. Her piece delivers a fresh and eye-opening argument about how such closure can become a potent ground for future redressive work, enabling people to unsettle dominant notions of victimhood and re-imagine redress.”

Shoko was also a finalist for the 2024 Roy A. Rappaport Student Paper Prize from the AAA’s Anthropology & Environment Society for her paper, “Promises and Regrets: Negotiating Repair after Toxic Exposure in Japan.”