Kei Kato (PhD student, Geography) and Taisuke L. Wakabayashi (PhD student, Landscape Architecture) have been awarded 2024 Nicholson Fellowship to attend School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.  In an intensive six-week course of study, participants work with a faculty of distinguished scholars in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium which are attended by the entire group. The program also includes mini-seminars and stand-alone lectures. The Unit’s fellowship covers the tuition and provides a housing stipend. 

Kei is a Ph.D. student in Geography from Japan. He seeks to understand how cities in the 21st century U.S. are constructed through the interplay between settler colonialism and Indigenous navigations of such violent realities. In particular, for his dissertation research, he focuses on the tensions between settler management and governance of the ocean and Indigenous ways of interacting with the ocean as integral components of the urban process. As a Nicholson fellow, he hopes to advance this project by exploring humanistic approaches to the climate crisis in the seminar Climate Humanisms, Fictional Futures.

Tai is a Ph.D student in Landscape Architecture (History and Theory). His research explores how human-radioactive relationships unfold into nuclear landscapes, shaped by atomic deployments, large-scale nuclear infrastructures, radioactive waste management and disposal practices. These landscapes are the site of co-productions where humans negotiate with the challenges posed by material properties of radioactivity. Based on New Materialism and Poststructuralism, his dissertation proposes four productive categories for understanding human-radioactive relationships to theorize four dynamic morphologies of nuclear landscapes through case studies in Japan and the U.S. As a Nicholson fellow, he will be attending the seminar Philosophies of the Natural and the Social.