Academic Manuscript Workshops:
Academic Year 2020-2021
"Race and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Japan" Manuscript Workshop
In January 2021, 21JPSI convened an interdisciplinary group of six American and Japanese scholars on contemporary Japan to present, discuss, and receive critical feedback on their work-in-progress academic manuscripts. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop was held virtually via Zoom.
Prof. Atsuko Abe
J. F. Oberlin University, Professor of Political Science and International Relations
Paper Title: “Migrant Domestic Workers: Immigration Policies Exacerbating Gender Inequality in Japan and South Korea”
Atsuko Abe is a Professor of Political Science and International Relations in the College of Arts and Sciences, J. F. Oberlin, Tokyo, Japan. Her Ph.D is from Cambridge University, UK in the 1990s. She went back to UK in 2010-2011 as Visiting Scholar at Centre on Migration, Policy and Society and Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her recent focus is on migrant domestic workers and feminist political theory. She translated Dr. Erin Aeran Chung’s Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2010) from Akashi Shoten, 2012.
Prof. Mitzi Uehara Carter
Florida International University, Assistant Teaching Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies; Director of the Global Indigenous Forum
Paper Title: “Chuuto-Hanpa and Barbed Wire Kinks: Black Okinawan Racialization in Militarized Spaces”
Mitzi Uehara Carter is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies and is the Director of Global Indigenous Forum at Florida International University in Miami, FL. Carter served as a Fellow with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in Okinawa Japan (2011-12) at the University of the Ryukyus. She researches ethnographic methodology of militarization in Okinawa and transnational understandings of Blackness in Japan. Carter received her B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley.
Ms. Kimberly Hassel
Princeton University, Department of East Asian Studies, PhD Candidate
Paper Title: “Not Just a Trend: Digital Activism, Black Lives Matter, and Black Japanese (Counter)Narratives in Contemporary Japan”
Kimberly Hassel (pronouns: she/her/hers) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University specializing in cultural anthropology and contemporary Japanese society. Her research interests include youth culture, digital ethnography, identity formation, gender, and race and ethnicity. Kimberly’s dissertation, “Mediating Me: Digital Sociality and Smartphone Culture in Japan”, focuses on the relationship(s) between Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and the (re)figuring of sociality and selfhood in contemporary Japan, particularly among youths. Her dissertation fieldwork was sponsored by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship. Kimberly holds a BA from Dartmouth College in Japanese modified with Anthropology, and is an alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT).
Ms. Yasmine Krings
University of California Los Angeles, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, PhD Candidate
Paper Title: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: Yassa Mossa and the Impossibility of Black Japanese-ness”
Yasmine Krings is a PhD candidate in UCLA’s Asian Languages and Cultures Department. She previously received a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago and an MA in Regional Studies – East Asia from Harvard University. Her research focuses on conceptions and portrayals of mixed-race-ness in Japan across visual and textual media in the postwar (up to 1970s), with special attention paid to global circulations of anti/blackness and negotiations of legacies of US and Japan empire. Her prior work and general interests include women’s literature, motherhood, gender and sexuality, blackness, and postcolonial studies.
Prof. Yuichiro Onishi
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African American & African Studies; Asian American Studies Program, core faculty member
Paper Title: “Toward a Political Theory of Deoccupation”
Yuichiro Onishi is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African American & African Studies and a core faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (NYU Press, 2013) and co-editor of Transpacific Correspondence: Dispatches from Japan’s Black Studies (Palgrave, 2019).
Prof. Marvin Sterling
Indiana University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of Anthropology, Associate Professor
Paper Title: “Neoliberal Intimacies, Global Blackness, and the ‘Kokujin-Hafu’ Experience: Toward an Anthropology of Contemporary Afro-Asia”
Marvin D. Sterling in his research has explored a range of Afro-Jamaican cultural expressions in Japan, including roots reggae, dancehall reggae, and Rastafari. He ethnographically explores the dimensions of social power—such as gender, class and ethnic difference—that inform Japanese engagement with these cultural expressions. This engagement permit analysis of how ideas of race and particularly blackness are imagined in Japan and around the globe. In a more recent line of research, he traces the development of human rights discourse and practice in Jamaica. In another recent line of research, Sterling ethnographically explores the experiences of mixed-race peoples of Japanese and African descent as insight into the imagination of Japaneseness and blackness in Japan today. He is author of Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan (Duke University Press, 2010).