Bio

Ryoko Yamamoto is an Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Old Westbury. Her research interests focus on international migration, social stratification and the construction of deviance in contemporary Japan. More broadly, her sociological curiosity is often drawn to issues surrounding boundary-making, boundary-breaking and societal reactions to boundary-breaking. She investigated the intersection of immigration control and crime control in “Migrants as a Crime Problem: The Construction of Foreign Criminality Discourse in Contemporary Japan” (2010), “Bridging Crime and Immigration: Minority Signification in Japanese Newspaper Reports of the 2003 Fukuoka Family Murder Case” (2013), and “Convergence of Control: Immigration and Crime in Contemporary Japan” (2014, with David T. Johnson). She carries a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa.