Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 4, 202655 min

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tectonic belt in the Pacific region that routinely faces some of the most devastating disasters in the world. Based on ethnographic research spanning seven years, Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire (Stanford University Press, 2026) examines the work of preparedness training in Japan and Chile, two primary nations...

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0:00

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Chica

0:13

Wantanabe about a book just out in 2026 from Stanford University Press titled Play to Survive Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire, which takes us into really a whole bunch of things.

0:26

So we're going to be talking about what is to live in a place where earthquakes are going to happen, are going to happen potentially a lot, are certainly something that kind of everyday,

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