Dr. Kelly Dietz
"Multicultural Japan in Global Context: Locating the Subject of Sovereignty in Discourses of Difference"
Kelly Dietz is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, NY. Her research and teaching focus on everyday forms of militarization, the colonial dimensions of foreign military basing, movements for collective rights and self-determination, and East Asian politics. She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation, which explores the intersections of coloniality, US military basing, and struggles over the subject of sovereignty in Okinawa, Japan. Dr. Dietz is on the Executive Board of the New York Peace Studies Consortium, representing Ithaca College and Cornell University. She co-founded the Futenma-Henoko Action Network, an international network based in Okinawa for the joint purposes of closing US Futenma Air Station and preventing the destruction of Okinawa’s Henoko Bay to make way for a new US military air base.
Publications include:
- "Demilitarizing Sovereignty: Self-Determination and Anti-Military Base Activism in Okinawa." In Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change, edited by Philip McMichael. New York: Routledge.
- "Japan." In The Indigenous World, edited by Kathrin Wessendorf. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.
Dr. Tessa Morris-Suzuki
"Semi-Citizenship and Marginality in Modern Japan"
Tessa Morris-Suzuki holds a chair in Japanese history in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Her research focuses on border controls and migration in East Asia, national identity and ethnic minorities in Japan, local grass-roots civil society in Japan, modern Japanese historiography, human rights in Asia, globalization processes, memory and reconciliation in Northeast Asia and most recently the Fukushima nuclear accident in social and historical context. She is currently engaged in research projects on conflict and reconciliation between Japan, China and the two Koreas; humanitarianism in mid-twentieth century Northeast Asia as well as migration and refugee issues in Northeast Asia. She further convenes the Asian Civil Rights Network, co-edits the network's online journal Asiarights and is a member of the International Council on Human Rights Policy.
Publications include:
- The Technological Transformation of Japan, Cambridge University Press.
- Re-Inventing Japan: Time Space, Nation, M.E. Sharpe.
- "Debating Racial Science in Wartime Japan." Osiris no. 13: 354-375.
- "Immigration and Citizenship in Contemporary Japan." In Japan - Continuity and Change, edited by Jeffrey Graham and Hideaki Miyajima Javed Maswood, 163-78. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
- The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, Verso.
- "Ethnic Engineering: Scientific Racism and Public Opinion Surveys in Midcentury Japan."positions: east asia cultures critique no. 8 (2):499-529.
- Borderline Japan: foreigners and frontier controls in the postwar era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Jennifer Robertson
"Visualizing Japanese Citizenship from the Perspective of Robots"
Jennifer Robertson is Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her primary area of specialty is Japan, and she has published on a diverse range of topics that span several centuries, including nativist and social rectification movements, agrarianism, sex and gender systems and ideologies, mass and popular culture, modern and contemporary art, nostalgia and internationalization, urbanism, the place of Japan in American Anthropology, sexuality and suicide, theater and performance, votive and folk art, imperialism and colonialism, and eugenics and bioethics. Her current research, supported by Guggenheim and Abe (SSRC) Fellowships, explores the cultural history of eugenics and the political economy of service robots and posthumanism. She is co-editor of Critical Asian Studies.
Publications include:
- Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan. Jennifer Robertson, editor. Waltham, MA: Blackwell Publishers
- Same-sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader. Jennifer Robertson, editor. Waltham, MA: Blackwell Publishers
- "Hemato-Nationalism: The Past, Present, and Future of 'Japanese Blood'." Medical Anthropology 31(2).
- "Eugenics in Japan: Sanguineous Repair." Chap. 25. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, pp. 430-448. Alison Bashford and Phillipa Levine, eds., Oxford University Press.
- "Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan." Body and Society 16(2) June: 1-36.
- "The Erotic Grotesque Nonsense of Superflat: 'Happiness' as Pathology in Japan Today." Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter: 1-26.