Solid Spaces and Flexible Times amid Environmental Catastrophe: Popular Media and Climate Change

Amanda Kennell

July 23 2025

18:00-19:30

Room 301, Building 10, Sophia University

In person only

In the last fifty years, technological developments have enabled information to travel across the globe at the speed of light and even be transformed into new linguistic and mediatic forms without immediate human oversight.  These developments have altered how humanity perceives time and space, which in turn affects how we

respond to the contemporary crisis of climate change.  In this presentation, I examine the role of digital technologies and contemporary patterns of popular media production in guiding human-environment interactions through the multimedia franchise Bungo Stray Dogs (2012-present).  Bringing foundational habits in media production, circulation, and consumption to the fore helps explain why human destruction of the environment continues despite widespread desire to halt climate change.

Amanda Kennell, Ph.D. researches modern Japanese media as an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (2023), examines the Japanese media environment through Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels.  She is currently working on the intersection of digital technologies and physical spaces.  Dr. Kennell’s work has been published by the British Museum, the International Journal of Comic Arts, the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, and The Washington Post, among others.  Her work has been supported by the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Nippon Foundation.  Her Ph.D. is from the University of Southern California, and her M.A. is from the University of Pennsylvania.

This event is organized by Tak Watanabe (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Sophia University) and the ICC Collaborative research Unit “Water and Society in Japan”.