Speaker Profile

Yoshitaka Ota

Director, Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, UW

Dr. Yoshitaka Ota has a background in social anthropology at the University College London. He has conducted ethnographic research on various coastal communities, including Palau, UK, Indonesia and Japan, studying socialization and cultural meanings associated with fishing practices. He is also director of the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center, an international initiative comprising an interdisciplinary team of 20+ institutes and cross-disciplinary scholars. As an anthropologist conducting social and cultural research on various coastal communities, one recurring theme he has witnessed worldwide is the inequity between who has access to and benefits from oceans and who relies on oceans to live. We need to create a new platform for ocean governance to identify the inequities that exist, develop knowledge-based solutions, and enact these changes to make oceans equitable for everyone.

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Scheduled Appearances

Our Plastic Planet

Crosscut Festival 2023
Sat May 6, 2023 | 2:45pm

The recently defeated Washington Recycling and Packaging Act sought to address the problem of plastic pollution; requiring companies to be responsible for the end-of-life management of packaging, set minimum recycled content requirements and ban some packaging. It failed to advance, so the question remains: what can we do to tackle the massive plastic problem here at home and all over the world?

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Featuring: Heather Trim, Rep. Liz Berry, Benjamin Woodard, Yoshitaka Ota

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About the Festival

The Cascade PBS Ideas Festival brings together journalists, newsmakers, and innovators from around the country to talk about the issues that are animating our cultural conversations. The festival includes live recordings of television and podcasts from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Pushkin, NPR and PBS; as well as community meetups, meet-and-greets, food trucks, DJs, and more.

The Cascade PBS Ideas Festival will take place May 4, 2024, at the Amazon Meeting Center, 2031 Seventh Ave. Seattle, WA 98121.

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