Anna Vaino

Thesis Title: Un-pausing communities: Social construction of recovery and the future in post-disaster communities of Tohoku

Academic Supervisor: Dr. Peter Matanle

The research critically analyses the "good practice" of post-disaster recovery that it argues has become removed and isolated from everyday context and functions of local society, based on flattened concepts of time, space and agency and therefore cannot respond to the complex nature of modern risks in post-industrial societies.

The thesis argues that recovery should instead be embedded into the everyday context and functions of local communities and societies that construct their reality through dwelled experience, thus improving the analysis on local risk factors, vulnerabilities and resilience.

The thesis utilises a qualitative methodology based on visioning and construction of imagined hypothetical futures in four disaster struck communities in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Research interests:

• Community development
• Social construction
• Democracy, social justice and power in post-industrial societies

Research Activity

Conference presentations

• Un-pausing communities: Social construction of recovery for sustainability, Graduate Conference for East Asian Studies, 9th - 10th December 2016, Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin.
• Un-pausing Communities in Tohoku: Social Construction of Recovery and the Future by Grassroots Actors, The second European Association for Japanese Studies Conference in Japan, 25th - 26th September 2016, Kobe University, Japan.
• Civil society organisations in post-disaster Tohoku: Community development as guide to recovery, British Association for Japanese Studies, 10th - 11th June 2015, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
• Single father defying established gender roles in Japanese Society: Restructuring fatherhood in the absence of the mother. Nordic Association for Japanese Studies, 19th -20th March 2009, University of Turku, Finland.

Published Articles

• Vainio A. (2015). Japanese family friendly policies - Why fathers matter? Asia In Focus, Vol. 1, March 2015.