When brainstorming ideas for my research paper, my only starting point was that I wanted the topic to relate to my major, Earth System Science. As someone who has always dabbled in "the two worlds" (as Prof. Fan calls it), in the sciences and in the humanities, with a love for studying weather phenomena, but for writing too, I wanted to merge my two interests. Though I had inklings of other ideas, I kept finding myself thinking more about this poem. The language was so simplistic, and yet in its simplicity, I felt like there was more there. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that choosing Pebbles of Poetry would be the most “uniquely me” project. 

I immigrated to America from Japan on March 9, 2011. 

The disaster in Japan occured on March 11, 2011. 

My family has always talked about the luck that we were blessed to have in just barely missing disaster. But of course, I remember anxiously watching the news in a hotel room, peering over my mother’s shoulder to see her phone, hearing about my friends who were trapped at school with no way of going home. I’ve always felt a connection to that day as an important part of what fueled my passion for science, for wanting to study natural disasters and mitigate their damage.

A major part of my identity as a person is being bilingual, multiracial, and multicultural. With a British father and a Japanese mother, speaking both English and Japanese at home, I have always been interested in the intricacies of language—how meaning cannot be as easily converted from language to language as scientific measurements can be converted from unit to unit. I take pride in keeping up my Japanese while living in the U.S. for so long, and I felt that challenging myself with a work of poetry in Japanese, and comparing it to its English counterpart, would capture perfectly both sides of my heritage. 

Science can explain why a natural disaster strikes. 

Science can explain how much damage a storm is predicted to cause.

But it can’t predict how people, humans, will react, how they will rebuild, how they will move forward. How they’ll connect with each other, relate to one another, support one another. 

I think looking at a text that delves into the human-to-human and human-to-nature relationships will be an interesting supplement to my education on the scientific side of disasters.

At the Humanities Core Research symposium, I gained valuable insights from past students who have conducted successful research projects, and I hope to follow in their footsteps. 

The following are the points I have found the most inspiring: 

Combining two topics of research to create

thoughtful and original investigations

• • Both students who presented their research in the 9:00am session utilized similar approaches to their papers. Josephine Bhadran combined literary analysis of Circe with the study of “feminist revolutionary mythmaking,” applying this lens to her analysis of the book. David Diaz combined visual analysis of the TV show Steven Universe with the discipline of “Queer Theory” to apply new and insightful interpretations of the work. 

  • Hearing about the methodologies had me thinking about my own project. After reading the secondary source “Semiotics of Disaster” by Tong King Lee, I recognized that Disaster Writing and Ecopoetry are distinct genres of literature with pre-established scholarly discourse. I wonder if this is a lens I can apply to Pebbles of Poetry. 

Research what Scholars are saying, 

but have something to say, too.

• • Both students shared the importance of not falling victim to reiterating what scholarly secondary sources are already saying, but to enter the scholarly discussion, and have a uniqueness in your own ideas and thoughts. This resonated with me, as I felt as though I had not fully grasped that the purpose was to have something new to say, rather than simply researching and compiling what you have found. I found this to be a valuable piece of advice, and it has changed the way I annotate and read my Scholarly Sources. Not simply absorbing them for what they are, but having critical comments of agreement and disagreement noted. 

to conclude, please listen to a passage of the beautiful poem below: