Fung Wan Yin Kimberly

Fung Wan Yin Kimberly (PhD, Hitotsubashi University 2025) is an anthropologist and writer whose research focuses on the socio-environmental transformations of post-industrial landscapes, particularly the afterlives of extraction. Her dissertation examines the century-long aftermath of the Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Incident, Japan’s first major industrial pollution disaster in the late nineteenth century.

Her ongoing research includes a comparative study of closed mines in Japan, focusing on how practices of pollution mitigation, river engineering, and environmental restoration intersect to shape geographies of ruin and life, abandonment and repair. This research centers sediments as well as plants as key material agents in the formation and unsettling of boundaries between the toxic, the safe, and the inhabitable.

Fung’s research has been published on platforms including Critical Asia Archives, Network in Canadian History & Environment, and Environmental History Now. She also engages in literary and creative practices. She has participated in exhibitions, including the 2022 Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong). Her creative writing piece “The Forest Does Not Wait” (2026) is featured in you are here: the journal of creative geography , and her nonfiction piece “What Cannot Be Unearthed” (2026) received an honorable mention in the 2025 Tell the Untold! Environmental Writing Competition hosted by the Rachel Carson Center and is published in Environment & Society Portal's Virtual Exhibitions.

She is currently a regular contributor to Ming Pao’s Ivory Express column and has also contributed to HKEconomic Journal, Initium Media, the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Shanghai University), and other platforms in Asia. These experiences continue to inform her attention to landscape in her current work, as well as her interdisciplinary and collaborative approach. She is also a Certified Associate Archivist (National Archives of Japan).

Her study and research have been supported by the Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Nomura Foundation, and the Mishima Kaiun Memorial Foundation.

Recent Work:
- "What Cannot Be Unearthed" (2026, Environmental & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions, Rachel Carson Center)
- "Fieldwork In-between: Walking and Cutting Grass in Japan’s Post-Mining Landscape" (2026, Environmental History Now)

Public writings in Ming Pao's "Ivory Express" column and HKEconomic Journal's "Cultural Politics" column (Traditional Chinese) can be found on my Notion.

A full CV is available here. (external link to personal website; last updated: 20 Aug 2026)