Ina Kim

Dr. Ina Kim is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching explores the entanglements of bodies, ecologies, and politics in Japan and Transpacific Asia. Her scholarship examines how political, scientific, and biomedical practices shape understandings and experiences of what constitutes a “natural” or “normal” body and environment in a world increasingly saturated with toxins, including radiation, industrial chemicals, and allergens.

Her first book project, Detect the Unnatural: Data, Bodies, and Ecology in Post-Nuclear Japan, investigates the everyday practices of citizen laboratories that emerged in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. By examining radiation detection as both a scientific and political practice, the project demonstrates how citizen labs reimagine and recalibrate the boundaries of (un)natural across human and nonhuman bodies, ecological systems, and political life. In doing so, it illuminates alternative ecological imaginaries and forms of political subjectivity that challenge dominant narratives of post-Fukushima disaster governance, extending beyond Japan to the broader trans-Pacific “nuclear world” shaped by the global history of nuclear technology.

Dr. Kim’s research and teaching interests span biopolitics, disaster and environmental governance, political economy, science and technology studies, energy politics, and health justice in Transpacific Japan and Korea.