Andrew Littlejohn awarded Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship
Dr. Andrew Littlejohn has been awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The fellowship provides funds for early-career scholars to write and publish significant monographs that will impact the development of anthropology.
During his fellowship, Andrew Littlejohn will complete his book manuscript, After the Flood: Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan. As oceans rise worldwide, many governments are intensifying efforts to defend the towns and cities bordering them. After the Flood examines a core paradox of such efforts: how safety infrastructures can undermine the very objects—social worlds—they claim to protect. It draws on 18 months of ethnographic research in Minamisanriku: a town in northeastern Japan devastated by the tsunami of 2011. Through exploring why and how some survivors resisted new infrastructures of protection following the disaster, the book shows how modernist attempts to “hold the line” against the sea—or fortify the line further—are ill-suited to a time when the borders between human and non-human are breaking down, materially and conceptually. By thinking with the alternatives that residents proposed, it also argues that other ways of “ecologizing safety” premised on un-dividing are possible.
Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowships provide up to $40,000 towards the writing-up of already completed research. The fellowship is awarded to early career scholars, who frequently lack the time and resources they need to publish their work. Applicants should be no more than ten years beyond their PhD, with allowances made for periods of caregiving, and have a doctorate in anthropology or an equivalent field. A maximum of eight Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowships are awarded annually.