Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad Program: Participatory Resilience in a Time of Disaster: Alternative Youth Movements in Rural Tohoku, Japan

Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad Program: Participatory Resilience in a Time of Disaster: Alternative Youth Movements in Rural Tohoku, Japan Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad Program: Participatory Resilience in a Time of Disaster: Alternative Youth Movements in Rural Tohoku, Japan This project analyzes youth community climate sustainability movements in the rural Tohoku region of Japan under conditions of socioecological precarity and disaster. Using the lens of linguistic anthropology, this project proposes participatory resilience as a framework for considering younger adults community-focused sustainability initiatives. Participatory resilience refers to younger adults preference for local rather than top-down actions and prioritization of endurance into the future rather than growth as the goal of sustainability. Under the constant threat of climate disaster and the shadow of social destabilizations brought about by population decline and an aging society, younger adults interpretation of participatory resilience links the survival of depopulating rural locales to the survival of ecologies in novel ways. Ethnography of diverse community actions including sustainable woodworking communities, post disaster recovery through tourism, green agriculture, and rural sustainability summer schools. Even as these actions prioritize local engagement with rural locales, they create models of action that can be scaled and have wide ranging impacts. Pushing back against narratives of Japanese younger adults as disinterested in sustainability action, this project shows how younger adults are actively creating new forms of climate participation that articulate an imagination of intertwined social and ecological endurance.