Program Overview

*Schedule subject to change

Panel sessions at ICQE2026

Ethnography of disasters: How we can approach the human practice through qualitative and quantitative methodologies

Abstract

Ethnography is an established sociological methodology for exploring unfamiliar cultural practices. While many high-quality studies are presented at the conference, few focus on sociological research themes or the identification of previously unknown cultural practices. This panel session will examine how quantitative approaches in ethnography can be grounded in sociological research through in-depth, constructive dialogue between qualitative and quantitative scholars.

We focus on a social practice: disaster preparation and resilience. The history of humankind is an iterative process of building resilience in the face of disasters. Human communities have experienced many types of disasters, including wars, earthquakes, unknown viruses, and nuclear power plant meltdowns, to name just a few. Such events will continue to occur; they will not simply fade away. How can we endure these unexpected disruptions in our lives while sustaining and developing our societies and communities? How can we learn to be resilient to disasters based on our past experiences? How might a quantitative approach to this social practice provide new insights that go beyond traditional qualitative approaches?

In this panel session, four panelists will present their qualitative or quantitative studies on disaster-related human practices. Based on their reports, the panelists will discuss why they chose their respective approaches (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods) for their research programs, the challenges they perceive in adopting the alternative approach, and how they can continue to incorporate complementary methods in their fields.

Panelists

Mordecai G. Sheftall, Ph.D. (Shizuoka University, Japan)
Mordecai George Sheftall is an American author and scholar living in Japan since 1987. His major publications to date are Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses (2025), Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses (2024) and Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005). He is a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication in the Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University, a branch campus of the Japanese national university system. Sheftall's writing and research activities focus on the modern evolution of Japanese national identity, with particular emphasis on the Japanese experience in World War IIand the lingering effects of that conflict on both collective and individual Japanese consciousness. Fluent and literate in Japanese, he is a frequent commentator on modern Japanese history, culture and identity issues in public symposia and Japanese broadcast and print news media. He has also been a featured commentator and technical advisor on the History Channel series "Dogfights." He has contributed chapters to scholarly volumes on the legacy of the Second World War in modern Japanese society and on the historical, cultural and sociological analysis of the effect of military defeat on modern societies. His books explore the legacy of Japan's wartime activities.

Aleksandra Ross, Ph.D.
PhD in Cultural and Religious Studies. Her doctoral dissertation examined the nature–culture status of post-nuclear spaces, using the examples of the nuclear power plant disasters in Chernobyl (Ukraine) and Ōkuma (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan). She was the principal investigator of the research grant "(Bio)discourse after Disaster: The Nature–Culture Status of Nuclear Catastrophes in Chernobyl and Fukushima" (no. 2019/33/N/HS2/00268), founded by the National Science Centre, Poland.

A recipient of the Fulbright Junior Research Award 2022–2023, under which she conducted research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Her main areas of interest include methodology of environmental humanities, environmental history of post-nuclear spaces, the mycological turn in the humanities, and cultural context of climate change.

Miki Mochizuki, Ph.D. (Shizuoka University, Japan)
Dr. Miki Mochizuki is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Socio-Information Studies, Faculty of Informatics, Shizuoka University, Japan. She received her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Keio University, Japan, in 2013, and her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo, in 2019. Prior to her current position, she worked as a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). She has also taught at Keio University in Tokyo.

Her specialties include regional sociology, rural sociology, and disaster studies, and she has conducted long-term research on rural reconstruction following the Great East Japan Earthquake. Her book, The Sociology of Post-Disaster Recovery and Ikigai, received the 20th Research Encouragement Award of the Japan Sociological Society and has been widely recognized in the field.

She has examined psychological and community-based forms of care in post-disaster recovery. More recently, her research has focused on long-term and wide-area evacuation following the Fukushima nuclear accident, as well as on the coexistence of disaster preparedness and everyday life in coastal communities, based on fieldwork conducted in rural and mountainous areas of Japan.

Jun Oshima, Ph.D. (Shizuoka University, Japan)
Jun Oshima is a Professor at the Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology at Shizuoka University, Japan. He has conducted research on knowledge-building practices in Japanese school curricula, spanning from the elementary school to higher education. His recent work includes proposing a new assessment approach to identify how learners construct collective intelligence, using social network analysis of discourse. With the development of analysis software, he has conducted several studies to establish indicators of knowledge-building practices. His academic interests have also expanded to multimodal learning analytics through collaboration with sensor technology engineering teams and natural language processing research teams to explore how verbal and nonverbal interactions contribute to productive learning outcomes. He is a fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. He serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning and the Journal of the Learning Sciences, and is a co-editor of the International Handbook of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.