Current SEAA Board Members

cmgordon[at]cuhk.edu.hk Gordon Mathews is professor and chair of the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  He has written the books What Makes Life Worth Living: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2008, with Kit-wai Ma and Tai-lok Lui), and Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011)., and has co-edited books on consumption in Hong Kong, the Japanese generation gap, the pursuit of happiness globally, and economic globalization from below.  In 2017, his book The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace, will be published; after that, he hopes to write a book on life after death in Japan, China, and the United States.

robertsglendas[at]gmail.com I have two main areas of research: gender, family, and work in contemporary Japan, and immigration policy in Japan’s low-birth-rate, rapidly aging society. For the first topic, I am carrying out a longitudinal survey of ‘salarywomen’ since 2003, following them through their careers at a large firm. I also have a project underway with U. Hamburg on diversity and risk in Japanese employment. This relates to my second set of research interests on migration to Japan, on which I have written in the past and which I  continue to study.

lizhang[at]ucdavis.edu Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology and Interim Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Her interests include urban studies (especially space-making, urban planning, and power dynamics); global middle-classes and consumption practices; mental health and well-being; selfhood and therapeutic processes; labor migration; postsocialism; critique of neoliberalism; East Asia (especially China).

carolyn.stevens[at]monash.edu Carolyn Stevens is Professor of Japanese Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research to date has focused on the following themes disability, social welfare and maternal and child health care in Japan; and Japanese popular music, 1950s to present. She also has an interest more widely in sensory anthropology, and sound in Japan.

sealing[at]cuhk.edu.hk Sealing Cheng works on issues of gender, sexuality, migration and displacement, as well as human rights and the law. Her early work focused on how nationalism and sexuality impinged on the citizenship regime and sex work policies of South Korea. Her current research focuses on experiences of African asylum-seekers and refugees as creative and desiring subjects in Hong Kong.

jroth[at]mtholyoke.edu Joshua Roth is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His previous research explored the ways in which mediating institutions of immigration law and employment systems shaped the experiences of Japanese Brazilian migrants in Japan. He subsequently studied Japanese Brazilians in urban public spaces in Sao Paulo. His current research focuses on the history and culture of driving in Japan and he has written articles on discourses of emotions, manners, and safety; gender and lightweight cars; pedestrians, bicyclists and the shared road; and directional disorientation (hoko onchi). Currently, he is researching the scourge of kamikaze taxis and truck drivers in the era of high speed growth, and the efforts to control them.

eleana.kim[at]uci.edu Eleana Kim is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing are organized around core anthropological concerns with nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood and social value. Her past and ongoing projects include transnational adoption from South Korea, the ecologies of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and transnational circulations of medicinal ginseng.

priscillasong[at]wustl.edu Priscilla Song is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the nexus of medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and China studies. Her book Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/11028.html) illuminates how transnational journeys for fetal cell cures become tangled in complex webs of digital mediation, entrepreneurial logics of postsocialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics of clinical experimentation. Her current research examines the culture and ethics of end-of-life care technologies in the context of China’s rapidly aging population.

shaohua[at]sinica.edu.tw Liu Shao-hua is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research uses AIDS, drug use, leprosy, or environment issues as the vantage point to analyze the nature and trajectories of contemporary social change in China and Taiwan, as well as individuals’ life experiences and transformations within social change.

atakamori[at]marylhurst.edu Ayako Takamori is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary and Applied Liberal Arts at Marylhurst University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is driven by an enduring interest  in how belonging and identities are negotiated and mediated across borders and in post-conflict contexts. Areas of interest include comparative race and ethnicity, transnationalism and globalization, gender and sexuality, and media and visual cultures. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Traversing Borders: Japanese American Transpacific Positionings, about Japanese American ethnic formations in Japan.

tianyux[at]stanford.edu Tianyu Xie is a third-year Ph.D. student in Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Her research focuses on a group of Chinese women venture capitalists who have channeled transnational venture network between China and United States. The major research question is how gender and kinship have shaped entrepreneurial relationship and the way transnational venture capitalism operates.

jw28[at]rice.edu Jing Wang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Rice University. Her broad research interests are historical imagination, anthropology of state, urban development, social movement, ethnic community, documentary production, and modern Chinese art. Her dissertation project (July 2015 – July 2016) focuses on the Chinese state’s ongoing promotion of domestic multiculturalist policies through exploring the way it mobilizes cosmopolitan imaginaries of the “New Silk Road.”