Everything everywhere all at once: Chasing SDG themes at the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo (Isaac Gagné) скачать в хорошем качестве

Everything everywhere all at once: Chasing SDG themes at the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo (Isaac Gagné)

VSJF Annual Conference 2024 'Sustainability in Japan' Programme and Details https://dij.tokyo/vsjf2024 Everything everywhere all at once: Chasing SDG themes at the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo Isaac Gagné (German Institute for Japanese Studies, DIJ Tokyo) What does the World Expo mean in the 21st century? And what does it mean for Japan in 2025? This presentation will look briefly into some possible meanings of the 2025 Osaka / Kansa Expo, with a focus on how some of the most visible key terms, SDGs and Sustainability, are being used by the Expo organizers and sponsors. Based on an analysis of the Expo 2025 website and available PDF documents, including its 62-page “Sustainability Action Plan”, as well as an examination of promotional websites for national, domestic, and corporate pavilions, theme weeks, co-creation challenges, and corporate sponsor’s websites, I investigate the ways that SDGs and Sustainability more broadly is invoked and described to advertise the Expo. My preliminary analysis reveals at least 52 official and semi-official themes, subthemes, concepts, and goals in the Expo material, of which the terms “Life”, “Future”, and “Nature” figure most prominently. However, the sheer number of themes and subthemes, and the loose ways that various terms are used, risks turning the Expo narrative into a word salad that says everything and nothing at once. In other words, the grand proclamations by Expo organizers and corporate sponsors may be all sound and fury, signifying nothing; however, I suggest that the very fact that these themes have become global touchstones for corporate and national self-promotion implies that we may be witnessing a heightened international awareness about Sustainability, and mega-events like World Expos may be important testing grounds for what concepts “stick” in the global arena. Hence, I offer some thoughts on the implications that such narratives have for the discourse of Sustainability in Japan, and for the meaning of Sustainability in the contemporary age of global capitalism and national branding. Isaac Gagné is a Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) and Managing Editor of the DIJ’s interdisciplinary journal, Contemporary Japan. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Yale University and has worked at Waseda University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include theories of moral economy, religious globalization, social welfare, community-based mental healthcare, and the cultural industries. He coedited Japan through the lens of the Tokyo Olympics (Routledge, 2020), and his work has been published in the edited volume Rethinking Locality in Japan (Routledge, 2022), as well as in Transcultural Psychiatry, Japan Review, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Intersections, and others. Cite as: Gagné, Isaac. 2024. “Everything everywhere all at once: Chasing SDG themes at the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo”. Sustainability in Japan. Lecture series, ed. by Conrad, Harald, Barbara Holthus, Axel Klein. YouTube    • Everything everywhere all at once: Ch...  . Connect with the DIJ Tokyo YouTube:    / dijtokyo   Website: https://www.dijtokyo.org Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dijtokyo.org LinkedIn:   / dijtokyo   Newsletter: https://dij.tokyo/newsletter