Early-Career Scholar Forum

Producing Japaneseness in everyday life: Japanese women migrants in southeast London

Date
Friday, 1 July 2022 | 9:00 - 9:45 (JST)
Venue
Zoom Meeting
Language
English
Speakers
  • Kaoru Takahashi Lecturer, Center for Promotion of Higher Education, Kogakuin University
Moderator
  • Misako Nukaga Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo
Event Description

This study explores Japanese women migrants’ everyday experiences and cultural reproduction practices in southeast London. Drawing on an ethnographic study of their everyday life and social relationships, it asks how they make relational understanding of meaning and value of ‘Japaneseness’ to navigate their life as migrants in a middle-class neighborhood. With a conceptual framework of ‘translocalism’, this study illuminates the multi-layered identity formation of migrants, as well as their community-making practice in which the Japanese women creatively invent the meaning of their intersecting gender, ethnicity, and class identities to establish belonging to the locality. This disrupts the idea that migrant mothers with middling status are stable and worry-free subjects but rather they make ongoing negotiations to achieve a sense of belonging to the host society.

About the Speaker

Kaoru Takahashi is a lecturer at Kogakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research focuses on the gendered life trajectories and everyday experiences of Japanese women in London by using an ethnographic approach. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Goldsmiths, the University of London in 2019.