31st JAWS (Japan Anthropology Workshop) Conference at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of UAB enjoys great success
From 6 to 9 July, UAB hosted the world’s leading researchers in the Anthropology of Japan with the 31st JAWS Conference, which focused on the theme of “Research on Japan in the (Post-)COVID-19 Era”. The aim of the conference was to broadly address the ongoing impact and effects, as well as the immediate consequences and implications of the COVID-19 crisis for both Japanese society at large, and specifically in the area of anthropological research on Japan.
14/07/2022
JAWS is an international network of specialists in the Anthropology of Japan. Its conference at UAB gathered over 70 anthropologists from Europe, Canada, US, Australia, Singapore and Japan. During some twenty panel sessions, they presented over 50 papers on multiculturalism in Japanese society; media imaginaries; institutional discourses and critical political orders; civil society and digital activism; animals, robots and care in a ‘super ageing’ society; genes, humans and technologies; sites, places and social identity; affect and cultural practice; family life and emotion through time; the representation of Ainu ethnicity; and rural Japan in (post-)Covid times.
There was also an ethnographic lab and several ethnographic films were screened, with their directors in attendance, at the UAB Film Theatre. Although this was an in-person conference, two online sessions were programmed for PhD candidates as pre-conference events, offering an overview of the doctoral research currently underway at their respective universities (Kobe University, Osaka University, Ritsumeikan University, Venice Ca'Foscari, UAB, among others).
The conference brought together specialists from the world’s main international universities in the field of Japanese Studies (Oxford, Cambridge, SOAS University of London, LSE, Harvard, UC San Diego & UC Santa Barbara, Leiden, Vienna, Max Planck, Free University of Berlin, Melbourne, British Columbia, UAB, among others) and from Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Sophia, Ritsumeikan, Hokudai, Kansai Gaidai, Kanagawa, German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, among others).
The keynote address was delivered at the Casa de Convalescència – headquarters of the UAB in Barcelona – by Dr. Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and Warden of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. Dr. Goodman is the author of key works for understanding Japanese society and has been the Head of the Social Sciences Division within the University of Oxford and President of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. In his keynote address, he offered reflections on the anthropology of resilience in the study of the social and political complexities that Japan is currently facing in the (post)Covid era.
The conference was organised by the GREGAL Research Group: Japan-Korea-Catalonia/Spain Cultural Circulation (2017 SGR 1596 GRE) of UAB, which studies the circulation of the cultural and linguistic industry, that, with Japan and South Korea at its heart, affects and transforms social realities in globalising processes on a world-wide scale, and the CERAO (East Asian Studies and Research Centre) of UAB, and it enjoyed the support of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of UAB – the only centre in the Catalan university system that offers Japanese Studies – and the Japan Foundation, the Japanese government’s institution for cultural diplomacy. For more information, see: https://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/gregal/ca/content/jaws-conference-barcelona-2022