Publications

2024     “Feminist Theory Theater: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1491 (co-authored with Christina Aushana, Yelena Gluzman, and Sarah Klein)

Abstract: This article introduces Feminist Theory Theater (FTT), an experimental reading practice developed by the co-authors. Described most simply, FTT asks a group of co-present readers to put a text “on its feet,” improvising and revising its performance as a mode of ongoing, embodied interpretation. The aim is not to settle on a consensus of what a text means or to work toward a finished performance. Instead of staging a single best performance, FTT invites texts-as-scenes to be interpreted and re-staged by any member(s) of the reading group. We offer FTT as a way to take up York and Conley’s (2019) proposal that the commitments of STS can and should be enacted in practices of pedagogy. Here, we present and analyze multiple scenes of FTT in action to consider the potentials and limitations of critical STS pedagogy. We include our earliest experiments developing FTT in Act I, reading Judith Butler with undergraduates in a university lecture hall in Act 2, and reading a syllabus with incarcerated students in a prison classroom in Act 3. We highlight the empirical ways that FTT resists interpretive closure, centering embodied reinterpretation, arguing that doing so re-embeds text in the world as a way for reading groups to revisionboth. However, this dynamic, non-teleological mode of reading causes trouble for lesson plans and “learning outcomes” that might support the institutional legitimacy of STS critical pedagogies. This contradiction hinges on the question of who and what teaches. We argue that this trouble is worth staying with as a practical contradiction to be grappled with in further research on and through STS critical pedagogies. We invite readers of this article to take up this question (and others) by trying with, reflecting on, and revising through the situated, open-ended mode of reading together that we call FTT. To that end, we present a free, printable zine, The Feminist Theory Theater Workbook, which can act as both a guide to a first attempt at doing FTT and an archivable trace of that reading.

2024 “Toward a Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Listening: An Ear With Power and the Policing of “Active Listening” Volunteers in Japan.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 00(0): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12436.

Abstract: This article develops the concept of an ear with power. An ear with power works through listeners who can, by listening, alter people's speech and other actions. It does so in ways that suit the institutions on whose behalf the listener acts. Unlike approaches focused on the effects of listening in interactions, an ear with power is a triadic relation in process, requires listening to listeners, and shows how absent listeners affect social relations. The article traces the implications of a complaint filed against Buddhist “active listening” volunteers in Japan after the 2011 disasters. Despite not using “Buddhist language” while volunteering, they were reported for “religious-sounding speech,” which led to the temporary hiatus of their volunteer activities. Analyzing the distributed listening that led to that censure, this article demonstrates how linguistic anthropology might reframe critical analyses of power and governance, which have tended to rely on vision and speech. More specifically, it considers the ramifications of acts of listening that precede the speech that they are imagined to follow, the process whereby listeners come to hear themselves through the ear of another, and the ways that policing listening can alienate listening from listeners.

2023  “Hope without a future: Conflicts between time and place in Japan after 3.11.”  positions: asia critique 31(1): 203-227

Abstract: In Kamaishi, a city in the Tōhoku region of Japan, the aging of the population and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami changed people’s relationships to time and place. For many people, “time stopped” when disaster struck. That stoppage compounded a weakening of the appeal of the future that had come with deindustrialization. Despite people’s lack of expectations for the future, “hope,” which is most frequently conceptualized as an orientation toward a not-yet, was a recurring theme there. This article argues that the form of hope most prevalent among people who lost their homes in the 2011 disasters relied on repetition and the creation of places of refuge. In those particular places, people could use the stoppage of time to their advantage by avoiding the pain of the recent past and the foreseeable future. Ironically, reporters and academics have raised the activities of people in Kamaishi as an example of hope for Japan’s future. That is, people closer to suffering focused on place-based hope whereas people at a distance transformed the struggle to create those places into a vision of the future, which sometimes made it difficult for survivors’ hope to endure.  [Hope, Time, Temporality, Place, Future, Suffering, Japan]

2023 “The Concept of Religion and the Challenges of World Peace.” Dharma World Vol. 50 Spring: 14-17.

2022 “Feminist theory theater workbook.” STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/feminist-theory-theater-workbook. Co-created with Christina Aushana, Yelena Gluzman, and Sarah Klein.

Abstract: Feminist Theory Theater (FTT) is a way to read theory (or anything) with others. Inspired by feminist STS and its commitments to embodied, situated and distributed sense-making, FTT asks readers to stage, discuss, and re-stage the text that they are reading. By centering provisional performances as materials for an ongoing process of collective interpretation, FTT asks readers to “put a text on its feet” not in the service of making a finished show, but rather as a mode of working, thinking, putting an argument into our bodies and classrooms and experiencing what it might feel like to stand with it. This workbook is the companion to our article for the ESTS thematic collection on Critical Pedagogy, titled "Feminist Theory Theater: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy".

2020    “The ear from nowhere: Listening techniques and the politics of negation in the practice of Japanese interfaith chaplains.” Language and Communication  71 (March): 72–82.

Abstract: This article examines the politics of listening in the work of Japanese interfaith chaplains. It argues that listening is an important but often overlooked aspect of language ideologies and, more specifically, of the formation of modern subjects. Interfaith chaplains are religious professionals who apply principles of clinical psychology to help people in settings ranging from hospices to disaster areas. The desire to help suffering people who do not share the same religious backgrounds as the chaplains motivates them to cultivate what I call an “ear from nowhere,” which is divorced from their respective religious traditions and from speaking-based authority. [Listening; language ideology; modern subjectivity; religion; suffering]

2018 “Religion Overcoming Religions: Suffering, Secularism, and the Training of Interfaith Chaplains in Japan.” American Ethnologist 45(2): 1-14.

Abstract: Interfaith chaplains responded to the suffering caused by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan by providing “care for the heart” in municipal funeral halls, temporary housing units, and hospitals. To gain access to those government-run spaces, however, chaplains had to suppress outward signs of their particular religious traditions, including prayers and Buddhist robes. They were neither remunerated for their labor nor allowed to proselytize. Gathering around suffering, suppressing religious differences to recognize suffering, and sharing suffering led chaplains to create a form of religion that they called “religion overcoming religions.” Ironically, this form of public religion exhausted the particular religions that formerly sustained their compassionate work, thus reproducing the alienation that their engagement with suffering is meant to overcome. [suffering, alienation, compassion, secularism, liberalism, capitalism, Japan]

2017     “Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake by Gregory Smits.” Environment and Society 8(1): 222-223.    [Review]

2016    Watanabe, Masako. "New Religions, Depopulation, and the Aging Population." Journal of Religion in Japan 5(2-3): 263-305. [Translation]

Abstract: More than 20 percent of Japan’s population is over the age of sixty-five, and 45 percent of all cities, towns, and villages in Japan are classified as “depopulated” by the national government. Researchers have long been aware of the challenges that the aging population and depopulation pose to traditional Buddhist temples. In contrast to those temples, many new religions were formed when people moved from farming villages to cities. This history of providing urban forms of belonging that sometimes fed off of the depopulation that traditional Buddhist temples struggle with has led scholars to overlook ways that depopulation and the aging population might be affecting new religions. This article asks whether and how population change in contemporary Japan is affecting new religions. More specifically, through the use of statistical data, interviews, and newsletters from Konkōkyō and Risshō Kōseikai, two new religions that have locations throughout Japan, it shows that new religions are facing many of the same issues as traditional Buddhist temples. Comparing the organizational form, practices, legal structures, and membership size of these new religions, this article looks at ways that they are affected by depopulation and the aging population and how they are working to serve aging members in depopulated areas.

2015     “Opening Up the Conversation.” Translator's Introduction to Foodscapes of  Contemporary Japanese Women Writers: An Ecocritical Journey Around the Hearth of Modernity by Masami Yuki, xiii-xvii. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.


2015    Yuki, Masami. Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers: An Ecocritical Journey Around the Hearth of Modernity.  New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. [Translation]

Abstract: Translated from Japanese, this study exposes English-language scholars to the complexities of the relationship between food, culture, the environment, and literature in Japan. Yuki explores the systems of value surrounding food as expressed in the work of four popular Japanese female writers: Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho.