Buhm Soon Park is a historian of science. His current research focuses on the Anthropocene in East Asia, the region that has emerged as a major emitter of greenhouse gases since the end of World War II. Park sees climate change not simply as a natural phenomenon brought on by economic growth but as a sociopolitical phenomenon that is deeply rooted in the colonial and postcolonial relationships.. That is, he tries to look at the changing relationship between humans and nonhumans, an aspect that the current discourse on the climate crisis easily fails to capture. For this, he conducts a comparative analysis of the exploitation of the land of Cheorwon before after the drawing of the DMZ, examining how rice produced in this area has played a significant role as an agent mediating the relations between Koreans and Japanese (before the DMZ), and humans and birds (after the DMZ).

Hyunjung Cho is an architectural historian who specializes in Korean and Japanese modern architecture and urbanism. By considering the particular condition of Japan as the “other” of Western modernism, and a nation bombed by nuclear blasts, Cho examines Japanese architecture as a case study to address the urgent issues of architecture in the era of the Anthropocene. She is interested in how Japanese architecture has developed a set of survival tactics to cope with various crises caused by wars, atomic bombs, and natural disasters, and how they have changed over time. What influence did the traumatic experiences of the atomic bombing and postwar ruins have on architects’ urban imagination in the wake of World War II? How have contemporary Japanese architects respond to the recent 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster and how their approaches to urban crisis and architectural strategies are different from those of their precedents? Her future research project includes the investigation of alternative building materials. Believing that wood might serve as the new building material to replace reinforced concrete, one of the main sources of carbon dioxide emissions, Cho plans to examine the potentials and limitations of modern wooden structures that prevail in the 21st century Japanese architectural scene.

Myung-Ae Choi is an environmental geographer looking at the cultural, political, and technological aspects of nature conservation in South Korea and the broader East Asia. She explores multispecies entanglements of the cranes, scientists, and devices involved in the making of artificial intelligence (AI) that can identify wildlife in and around the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). This ‘AI ecologist’ project carefully traces a series of attunements performed to make the AI work with scientists, devices, and animals. By looking closely at the process of AI in the making, She tries to find not just tensions but also the moments and spaces of creativity afforded from multispecies interactions. In other words, AI making could be a process of “rendering capable” of all the species involved. For her, AI is neither an autonomous system out of human control, nor an inert device under human control; instead, it is a “matter of care” that requires careful and continued interventions for multispecies flourishing in the techno-natural-cultural landscape of the Anthropocene.

Soo Hyun Kim is a paleo-ecologist who reconstructs and interprets the long-term history of environmental changes caused by natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Her research focuses on detecting the magnitude, timing, and cause of past droughts or fires indicated by paleo-ecological evidence such as mineral dust, pollen/spores, and charcoal extracted from sediments. Her current research, introduced here, is to investigate charred plant remains collected in the DMZ, in partnership with the National Institute of Ecology in Korea. The charred materials, as by-products of incomplete combustion, are black carbon particulates that hold various features of fires. The quantity and shape of charcoal fragments can be used to present the frequency and fuel source types of fires occurring in the DMZ. Fire has been considered a major disturbance mechanism to alter landscapes and ecosystem structures of the DMZ since the Korean War (Year: 1950-1953), but the extreme restriction of access to the DMZ has hindered characterizing dynamics of fire regimes in the DMZ. Therefore, this charcoal project has the potential to provide a useful means of understanding how fires have occurred in the DMZ.

Hanah Sung is a researcher in history and sociology of technoscience. Sung’s work explores multispecies entanglements through ecological knowledge politics in South Korea. Based on material-semiotics and governmentality studies, her research focuses on the knowledge production of classifying, valuing, and intervening nature and its ontological effect. She is currently expanding her inquiry to where Nature Conservation conflicts with Agriculture in East Asian context. A rice paddy, as a place of cultivating rice, was declared as a wetland ecosystem to be conserved at the Ramsar Convention held in South Korea in 2008. In this new declaration, human cultivating the rice paddy is considered as an essential element to maintain the ecosystem rather than a disturbance of the ecosystem. By following various methods of knowing rice paddies, Sung explores multiple ontologies of rice paddies, more specifically rice production sites, waterbird habitats, wetland system and Solar energy sites. This will be an attempt to enrich multispecies stories of the Anthropocene by including East Asian context.

Junsoo Kim investigates the state-nature relationship from an epistemological perspective known as urban political ecology. Kim has investigated the social-historical process by which various nonhuman agents intervened in the formation of East Asian developmentalism and urbanization, focusing on their material properties through the lens of more-than-human sociology. He explored the 'state-nature' relationship in the context of East Asia with regard to the colonial experience, the developmental state, and the cold war. Previously, the nation-state was considered a socially constructed subject in which only human agents were part of the construction of the state. However, in his argument, nonhuman agencies shape nation-states and alter the practice of state strategies and their formation. In this context, Kim published several research papers like Urban Pigeons and South Korean Development Urbanization, African swine fever viruses and more-than-human-territoriality, a pandemic that altered human-nature relationships, and Invasive Species (Procambarus clarkii) and its ontological politics and more-than-human-biosecurity. In this project, Kim observes the planetary urbanization process of sand, which is the material foundation that sustains the Korean peninsula's developmental urbanization. He examines the political ecology of sand by focusing on sand's social material figures. This project aims to provide a new understanding of the relationship between South and North Korea's social, political, and ecological entanglements.