JP

Organization

Research Division

Practical Research and Collaboration Division
Disaster Memory Studies Lab
Visiting Associate Professor
University of Bologna, Italy
Research Subject(s)
I explore places who have been subject to disaster (Tohoku region, and more recently, Venice, Italy, as a slow disaster) through the lense of memory studies and dark tourism studies (tourim in places of disaster). I also work at the intersection of DRR, affect studies, and critical geographies.
Key Words
memory / dissonant memory / affect / dark tourism / disaster
Website
Research Activities

I work with local communities on intersections between disasters, emotions/affect, and memory.
I work on critical geographies of memory, recovery and slow disasters - disasters that appear in longterm, at times decades, and not suddent occurrences-.
Long-term ethnographic fieldwork in post-2011 Tōhoku, continuous since 2016 (ongoing returns).
Site-based fieldwork at memorial landscapes, preserved ruins, seawalls and reconstruction infrastructure.
Walking interviews and other mobile methods.
 

Other activities: 
Activities such as summer schools, winter schools and seminars on Dissonant memories and movements, and international collaboration between Bologna–IRIDeS for Winter School in March 2026.
Supervising and running student-involved field projects.
Peer review and editorial work.

Selected Works

Martini, A. (2025). What Terra are we terraforming? Lessons from the 2011 triple disaster in Japan. Geoforum, vol. 164, 1-9 104331 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104331 ;

Martini, A. (2024). “We are in jail!” Seawalls and Landscape justice in post-disaster Japan. Landscape Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2025.2465678 ;

Martini, A. & gerster, J. (Forthcoming). After Disaster: Earthquakes, tsunamis and climate events. In Ken Foote and Yong Tang (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Public Memory.

Sharma, N., & Martini, A. (2024). Dark tourism geographies: ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives. Tourism Geographies, 1-10.

Martini, A. (2024). Geographies of mobility justice: Post-disaster tourism, recognition justice, and affect in Tohoku, Japan. Mobilities.

Selected Memberships
  • Royal Geographic Society
  • Landscape Research
  • European Association of Social Anthropologists