I am a political anthropologist who has worked on non-elite citizens' engagement in local politics. I have written two books about Japan, Bicycle Citizens: the Political World of the Japanese Housewife, U Calif. Press, 1999, and The Art of the Gut:.....More
I am a political anthropologist who has worked on non-elite citizens' engagement in local politics. I have written two books about Japan, Bicycle Citizens: the Political World of the Japanese Housewife, U Calif. Press, 1999, and The Art of the Gut: Manhood, Power, and Ethics in Japanese Politics, U Calif., 2010. These projects focused on political consciousness but also engaged strongly with questions of social geography and mobility. Since 2012 I have added Italy as a field of study, and I am doing comparative work on urban space and citizen engagement in Bologna and Tokyo that has been financially supported by the Fulbright program and the Association for Asian Studies. Currently, I am writing a book manuscript based on work in Bologna, "Opposing the Desert: Reconstructing Democratic Space in the Postgrowth Era." The project investigates community stakeholders' ideas and experiments for creating public spaces that help citizens wrestle more effectively with challenges such as demographic changes, longterm economic decline, precarity, and environmental limitations to growth. My most recent publication is: "Designing a Beautifully Poor Public: Architectural Discourses of Postgrowth Community in Italy and Japan," Journal of Political Ecology, 2018.
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