Speakers
Anne Allison is Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of three books: Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago, 1994), Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-Harper/Collins 1996, California 2000), and Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (California, 2006). Currently working on precarious youth, flexible labor, and emergent sociality in contemporary Japan, Allison is also co-editor of the journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Andrea Arai teaches in the Jackson School of International Studies, Japan Studies Program at the University of Washington. She is completing the edited volume Global Futures in East Asia with Ann Anagnost and Hai Ren, and one of the chapters in the volume Notes to the Heart: Learning to “love your country” in Neoliberal Japan. She is also finishing a book manuscript, Recessionary Sensibilities, on the new effects of time and value of the economic downturn from the 1990s and the reshaping of realities and representations of Japan and its youth amid restructurings of education and labor. Recent publications include “The Neoliberal Subject of Lack and Potential: Developing “the Frontier Within” and Creating a Reserve Army of Labor in Japan,” and “The Wild Child of 1990s Japan” in the book Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present” (Duke University Press, 2006).
Hae-joang Cho is a professor at Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history and her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. She is the author of numerous books in Korean, including Talking at the Edge: Letters Between Japanese and Korean Feminists (2004, with Ueno Chizuko), It’s Life-Learning Village Again (2006), and Back to the Classroom: Reading Text and Reading Everyday Lives in Neo-liberal Era (2008). She also has two books translated into Japanese, Korean Society and Gender (Hose University Press) and Can the Words Reach? (Iwanami, coauthored with Ueno Chizuko). Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture), which has been an alternative educational and cultural studio for teenagers since 1999.
Lisa Hoffman is an Associate Professor in the Urban Studies Program at University of Washington Tacoma and she has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology (UC Berkeley). Her work has focused primarily on new techniques of governing, subject formation, and questions of neoliberalism in contemporary China. She has been particularly interested in the rise of professionalism and the links between “human capital” development and urban transformation. Her book-length ethnography on this research, Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent, will be published this spring by Temple University Press as part of their Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series. Hoffman also has examined governmental rationalities of environmental city-building in China and sustainability as a governmental problem. Her new research project is on the intertwined domains and actions of volunteerism, philanthropy and corporate social responsibility in urban China.
Gabriella Lukacs is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on mass media, television production, media globalization, new media, labor, and subjectivity in contemporary Japan. Her book titled Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2010. Her current book project explores new forms of Internet-based entrepreneurship in Japan that have evolved in the 1990s, a period in which the economic recession further narrowed down women’s chances for career-track employment, while information technologies have expanded their opportunities for new forms of work.
Dr. Hai Ren is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His research and teaching interests include popular culture, media studies, and political theory. He is the author of Neoliberalism and Culture in China and Hong Kong: The Countdown of Time (Routledge, forthcoming). He is currently revising a book manuscript that critically examines the role of the Chinese middle class in risk society.
David H. Slater David H. Slater is an associate professor of cultural anthropology and Japanese studies at Sophia University, Tokyo. He works on youth, capitalism, urban space and semiotics, and more recently, masculinity and media. He has just published a co-edited volume (with Ishida Hiroshi) entitled Social Class in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2009) and an article entitled “The Collapse of Hegemonic Masculinity in Neoliberal Japan.”
Jesook Song is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. Jesook received her B.A. in Education Science at Yonsei University in Seoul in the Republic of Korea. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology with a minor degree in Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She wrote a book on unemployed youth and homelessness during the Asian Debt Crisis, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (Duke University Press, 2009) and articles on the subject that were published in Positions, Journal of Youth Studies, and Feminist Review. Her second book on South Korean housing issues and family independent women is under review and an edited volume on transnational capitalism of South Korea is forthcoming (Routledge). Her new fieldwork project focuses on mental health, education, and welfare, and it is funded by a long-term research grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council.
Akiko Takeyama is an assistant professor in Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Kansas. Her research interests lie in gender, sexuality, class, subjectivity, the body and affect, and popular culture in contemporary Japan and, by extension, East Asia. She is the author of “Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club” in Genders, Transgenders, and Sexualities in Japan (Routledge 2005) and “Intimacy for Sale: Entrepreneurship and Commodity Self in Japan’s Neoliberal Situation” in Japanese Studies (forthcoming). She is currently completing her book manuscript, Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in Tokyo Host Clubs.
Xia Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on migration, labor politics, masculinity, rural-urban relations, subjectivity, globalization and modernity in contemporary China. Her essay, “Ziyou (Freedom), Occupational Choice, and Labor: Bangbang in Chongqing, People’s Republic of China” came out in International Labor and Working-Class History. Her dissertation Carrying out Modernity: Migration, Work, and Masculinity in China examines the male shoulder-pole porters’ sense of masculinity and their quest for modern subjectivities in relation to the changing meaning of rural-to-urban migration, flexible employment and certain form of service labor in Chongqing, an inland city which has become the “test field” for China’s land and financial reform and has undergone rapid urbanization and globalization since the 1990s.
Discussants
Nancy Abelmann is an Associate Vice Chancellor for Research (Humanities, Arts and Related Fields) and the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She co-directs the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI, www.eui.uiuc.edu) and served as the director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies from 2005-2008. She has published books on social movements in contemporary South Korea; women and social mobility in post-colonial South Korea; Korean America; and South Korean film; and most recently, The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation (Duke University Press, 2009). With psychologist Sumie Okazaki she is writing Domestic Toil: How Korean American Teens and Parents Make Family Work based on field and survey research in Chicagoland.
Ann Anagnost is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. She is the author of National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Duke University Press, 1987). She has another book forthcoming entitled Embodiments of Value in China’s Reform, which explores changing conceptions of human capital formation with China’s entry into the global economy. She is also co-editing a volume (with Andrea Arai and Hai Ren) entitled Global Futures in East Asia, which examines the role of affective production in the formation of labor subjectivities in national projects of economic restructuring in East Asia. Her current research interests are in the anthropology of food, particularly focusing on new social movements organized around the re-localization of food systems in China, the United States, and Italy.
Miyako Inoue is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, where she teaches linguistic anthropology and Japan studies. Her first book, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (University of California Press, 2006) traces the history of the idea of “Japanese women's language,” its emergence to the opening of the twentieth century in the context of Japanese modernization, and also presents an ethnographic analysis of the centrality of “women's language” in contemporary gender politics. Her current research concerns the social history of Japanese stenography and its linkage with the concept of liberal governance in the late nineteenth century and its supersession in the present. This book-length project calls into question the so-called “chikugo” (“verbatim”) and seeks to understand the production of the social epistemological categories such as “fact,” “evidence,” and “accountability.”