Email: shokoyamada[at]sophia.ac.jp
Office: 10-509
Tel: 03-3238-4044

Shoko Yamada is an anthropologist studying social and ethical life in the aftermath of environmental ruination. Her current book project, Promises of Repair: Social Life after Environmental Injury in Japan, chronicles decades-long attempts to repair damaged landscapes in a river basin in northcentral Japan. In tracing the everyday dynamics of these prolonged efforts across generations, the book illuminates how people grapple with the vast timescales of environmental predicaments today.

Before joining Sophia, Yamada was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. with distinction in Anthropology and Environmental Studies from Yale University. She currently serves on the board of the Society for East Asian Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association.

Journal Articles

• “Staying Put: A Comparative Study of Non-Evacuation During Environmental Disasters” (with Evan A. Singer, Andrés Triana Solórzano, and Michael R. Dove). 2025. Environmental Research Letters 20 054057.
• “Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties” (with Lav Kanoi, Vanessa Koh, Al Lim, and Michael R. Dove). 2022. Sustainability 14(5) 3095.
• “‘What Is Infrastructure? What Does it Do?’: Anthropological Perspectives on the Workings of Infrastructure(s)” (with Lav Kanoi, Vanessa Koh, Al Lim, and Michael R. Dove). 2022. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability 2 (2022) 012002.

Public Writing

• “Series: Theorizing Stuckness in Science and Technology” (with Michelle Venetucci). 2026. Platypus: The CASTAC Blog.
• “Imaginative Ecologies and the Possibilities of Anthropology” (an interview with Anand Pandian). 2020. Ekrits. A Japanese translation reprinted from Ibunsha in 2021.

Faculty of Liberal Arts

ANTHROPOLOGY OF JAPAN
ANTHROPOLOGY OF CRISIS
CRAFTING ETHNOGRAPHY