A new edited volume, “Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First Century East Asia” (Rutgers University Press, 2025), brings together case studies of youth- and community-led movements across the region. Edited by Jackson School Acting Assistant Professor Andrea Gevurtz Arai, the book is the outcome of a multi-year cross-college and cross-regional research initiative at the University of Washington focused on creative forms of grassroots resistance.
The volume grew out of a project launched in 2021 by Arai and College of Built Environments Professor Jeff Hou, with support from the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund. Their collaboration aimed to examine how young people and grassroots communities in East Asia are responding to issues such as income inequality, labor precarity, environmental degradation, ultra-low birth rate phenomena, and social disconnection. The project brought together scholars, scholar-activists, artists, and students from across East Asia and the United States.
With additional support from the UW East Asia Center, Center for Global Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Korea Studies, China Studies Program, Taiwan Studies Program, and Department of Landscape Architecture, the project culminated in a virtual conference in 2022. That event featured presentations and conversations exploring how local communities are building alternative futures through informal and often place-based efforts: repurposing abandoned urban spaces, preserving cultural institutions, and forming new models of collective life.
Cover of “Spaces of Creative Resistance”
The newly published volume, “Spaces of Creative Resistance,” includes contributions from conference participants as well as two of Arai’s graduate students, and marks the first major UW collaboration between a cultural anthropologist of East Asia and a landscape architect specializing in community design.
Organized into three thematic sections — Creative Acts of Resistance, Cultural Spaces and Community Places, and Environments of Creative Resistance — the book features case studies from China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
Along with College of Built Environments Ph.D. student Summer Dai, Arai will present “Spaces of Creative Resistance” on July 11 at Elliott Bay Book Company.
Arai is a cultural anthropologist of Japan and has co-edited two prior East Asia volumes supported by the East Asia Center. The first was “Global Futures in East Asia,” (Stanford University Press, 2013), and the second was, “Spaces of Possiiblity: Korea and Japan In, Between and Beyond the Nation” (University of Washington Press, 2016).