RYO MORIMOTO will share his work with Native American and Japanese college students as he practices what Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte describes as the “ethics of coordination.” Unlike the dominant, individual-focused Western mode of relationality, the “ethics of coordination” emphasizes building connections between people, across species, and among things. His talk will feature insights from his Nuclear Princeton Project and the Chain Reactions exhibition at Harvard, in collaboration with Hiroshima University, to illustrate how tracing radiation and radioactive materials can help unite rather than divide Native American and Indigenous communities and Japanese people.

Time: 1 PM

Location: Tommaney Library, Haskell Indian Nations University

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

RYO MORIMOTO is a first-generation college graduate and scholar from Japan and an assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard University. An ethnographer of human-nuclear relations, his research examines the surreal social (half)life of radiation and radiological materials in society, uncovering the links between historical, contemporary, and everyday nuclear world-making ideologies and practices and their lasting impacts on planetary, national, and local levels. Morimoto’s first monograph, Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone (California, 2023), has won numerous awards, including the 2025 Modern Japan History Association Prize and the 11^th Professor Joseph Kreiner Housei University Award for International Japanese Studies. His current research focuses on U.S.-Japan collaborations to develop a society enriched by and integrated with physical AI. Specifically, his ethnography examines the development and deployment of remote technologies (mobile robots) in coastal Fukushima by various stakeholders in industry, academia, and government to address urgent and diverse challenges in Japan and beyond: an aging population, disaster response and mitigation, and the decommissioning of aging and damaged nuclear reactors.

SPONSORED BY KU Center for East Asian Studies and Haskell Indian Nations University