Thursday, October 13 06pm
Kent Hall, Room 403
Columbia University, 116th Street & Amsterdam Ave. New York, NY
This lecture focuses on how the Japanese financial downturn of the 1990s gave rise to the powerful figures of “the strange child” and “the child problem.” Based on her recent book, Andrea Gevurtz Arai uncovers the critical conjunctures behind their forcefulness. She argues that these child discourses refocused concerns about precarious economic futures and provided rationale for neoliberal shifts in human capital development and national-cultural ideology. Arai shows how the young have been made the subjects and objects of dramatically altered life conditions of self-development, independence, and patriotism. The talk concludes with examples from her multi-site, long-term fieldwork and creative responses by members of the recessionary generation.
Arai received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2004, and she teaches Japan and East Asia anthropology and society courses at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (Stanford University Press, March, 2016); Co-editor of Spaces of Possibility: In, Between and Beyond Korea and Japan (University of Washington Press, Forthcoming, October, 2016), and Global Futures in East Asia (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Free admission.
For more information visit: http://www.keenecenter.org/