Andrew Littlejohn (Leiden University) "Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan"
| Dates: | 14 December 2026 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Andrew Littlejohn |
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As oceans rise worldwide, many governments are intensifying efforts to defend the towns and cities bordering them. Advocates of coastal infrastructure often argue that the best way to protect those places from unruly waters is separating sea and society through complex new systems of seawalls, dikes, and canals. However, after Japan’s triple disaster of 2011, many tsunami survivors resisted attempts to secure the northeastern coastline through new infrastructures, arguing for other, more socio-ecologically grounded ways of conceiving and enacting protection.
Littlejohn’s recent book, We Live with the Sea (2026, Duke UP), addresses this controversy and what we can learn from it regarding how to live safely. While the Japanese government proposed infrastructural transformations to protect lives and property, they did not consider those infrastructures' broader impacts on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn highlights the alternative proposals those survivors offered and the environmental, ecological, and more-than-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. Arguing that modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, he theorises instead what he calls “ecologizing safety” as an alternative way of conceiving and enacting safety and infrastructure.
Andrew Littlejohn is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University.
Speaker
Andrew Littlejohn
Organisation: Leiden University
Travel and Contact Information
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Boardroom, 2nd floor
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
