German Studies, Hester Baer is a featured speaker at NeMLA
March 11, 2022
Her talk is entitled "Nuclear Futures: Conceptualizing Care for the Post-Fukushima Age”
The theme of the 2022 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention is appropriately “care.” In German, care means Sorge (which is related to English “sorrow”).
This talk examines transnational cultural productions emerging in the wake of the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, an event that resonated strongly in Germany. The works under consideration attend to the spatiotemporal challenges of representing the nuclear, making palpable what is invisible to the eye and imperceptible to the mind through interventions into aesthetic form.
The talk draws on a collaborative research and teaching project that interrogates the concept of futurity in the context of environmental activism and artistic engagement with atomic issues from 1945 to the present, organized by Baer and her UMD colleague Michele M. Mason, an associate professor of Japanese cultural studies. With reference to this project, Baer considers the potential of care-based artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical frameworks for responding to the precarity of the present.
Her talk will take place March 12 at 7pm Dover C at John's Hopkins University.