The roundtable on 3.11 had the ambitious goal of tracing how the so-called triple disaster in Japan “changed our ways of knowing the world.” The variety of concerns, methodologies, and research sites brought into this discussion demonstrates how difficult that is to fully discern, even a decade later. This would be true of any large-scale disaster, but particularly one in which a nuclear meltdown is nested within a “thousand-year” tsunami, and with the added circumstance of having been witnessed globally in real-time. “Sources,” to use a keyword from the roundtable, expand and amplify quickly following any large disaster, and the ripples of opinion widen far beyond the experts and officials who the day before had been quietly managing the condition of normality.
