Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Acting Assistant Professor, Interim Chair of the Korea Studies Program (2023-24)

Contact

About

Classes for 2024-25

Fall 2024: JSIS 449/ANTH 443: “Anthropology of Modern Japan”: Winter 2025: JSIS 305 A/B “Global Activism: Media, Culture, Movements” & JSIS 484: “Film and Arts of the International Conflicts” (These courses are new this year and linked to current research)

Spring 2025, JSIS 405/ANTH 405 “Social Transformations in East Asia” (Students in this course will join a spring conference on low birth societies, reproductive labor and feminisms, environment and migrations in East Asia (with participation from SE and South Asia programs).

Academic Activities for 2024-2025

September 23, 2024, Seoul National University Invited Lecture: “Low-Birth East Asia: Capitalism’s 3Ds and Counter-Responses of the Commons”

November 14^th, 2024, “Asia Now” Invited course lecture on “The 3.11 Generation: Changing the Subjects of Gender, Labor, Environments” at University Pittsburgh

March 13-15, 2025, Association of Asian Studies, Cincinnati, Ohio, Panel and Discussant

March 17^th-20^th 2025, University of Pittsburg Japan Foundation Grant sponsored Conference on Low Birth and Reproductive Justice in Japan. Co-organizer and Presenter with Prof. Kay Shimizu (Political Science) and Professor’s Gabriella Lukacs (Anthropology) This conference will be followed by a second conference in Tokyo (March 2026) and a third conference at UW (March 2027)

April, 2025, University of Washington Title VI East Asia Center and the Center for Demography and Ecology Conference, Organizer and Presenter, “Ultra-Low Birth Rate East Asia: Crisis Discourses and Collaborative Responses”

Conferences at UPittsburg (2025 Spring), U of Tokyo (2026, Spring), University of Washington (2027 Spring)

Office Hours

By appointment.

Andrea Gevurtz Arai is acting assistant professor of Japan and East Asia studies and cultural anthropology in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She was the interim chair of the Korea Studies Program 2023–2024.

Arai is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (Stanford University Press, 2016). She co-edited (with Clark W. Sorensen) Spaces of Possibility: In, Between and Beyond Korea and Japan (University of Washington Press, 2016). and (with Ann Anagnost) Global Futures in East Asia (Stanford University Press, 2013). Arai is the editor of Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in East Asia (Rutgers U Press, June, 2025). Arai’s chapter, “Nuclear Visuality and Popular Resistance in Hitomi Kamanaka’s Eco-Disaster Documentaries” is forthcoming in Rachel DiNitto (editor) Eco-Disaster Films in Japan, Columbia U Press, 2025.

Arai is completing a second monograph: The 3.11 Generation: Changing the Subjects of Labor, Gender and Environment in Trans-Local Japan. She is collaborating on a new project on feminist biopolitics of low fertility; eco-socialism and the peripheral in East Asia. She is also starting a third book, on global activism and solidarity movements.

Education

Columbia University, Ph.D. Anthropology, 2004
Columbia University, MPhil, Anthropology, 1999
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, M.A. Communications and Translation Studies, 1986
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, TESL Post-Bac Certificate, 1984
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, B.A. Sociology and French, 1978