Fellows

Aynne Kokas is a multiple-award-winning researcher of US-Asian media and technology relations. Her first book, Hollywood Made in China (University of California Press, 2017), examines the cultural, economic, and political implications of film collaborations between China and the United States. Research for the book was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, the Chinese Ministry of Education, and others.  Her second book, Border Patrol on the Digital Frontier: The Global Battle for Data Security explores the role of data governance in the trade relationships China, Japan, and the United States. Kokas’ research has been supported by the

Misa Kayama, PhD, MSW is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Mississippi. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on cultural understandings of disability and stigmatization in the U.S. and Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India, through qualitative, ethnographic approaches and policy analyses. She is a co-author of two books, Disability, Culture and Development: A case study of Japanese children at school (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Disability, stigmatization, and children’s developing selves:

 Cultural anthropology: refugees and immigrants in Japan; homelessness; political activists; social and new media; digital archive and mediated ethnography; youth culture and new labor; disaster and recovery; oral narrative; Tohoku and Tokyo 

Adrian Van Allen is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies museums as technologies for organizing relationships between people, places, materials, and interests. Currently an Abe Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, she is conducting a comparative study of museum genomic collecting practices and policy in the USA, France and Japan. Her previous research has focused on connecting ethnographic objects and scientific specimens in natural history collections, examining their shifting value and the material practices in their remaking as cultural and ecological resources in the context of the Anthropocene. She holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California,

 Heejun Chang is Professor of Geography at Portland State University (PSU). He holds a BA and an MA from the Seoul National University and obtained a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching focus on water sustainability in a changing climate, land cover, and management. Dr. Chang has been leading transdisciplinary water research from a coupled natural and human system lens. He has collaborated with local watershed councils, municipalities, and a regional government in the Portland metropolitan area, in studying future climate change impacts on water quantity and quality and flood hazards using spatial statistics, social surveys,

Koji Ueno is Professor of Sociology at Florida State University.  He holds a doctoral degree from Vanderbilt University.  He conducts sexuality research using both quantitative and qualitative methods.  His quantitative research has focused on sexual orientation disparities in mental health, friendships, and educational and occupational attainment outcomes in early life stages.  He has received a grant from the National Science Foundation for this research.  For qualitative research, he has been conducting a longitudinal, in-depth interview study to examine sexual minority young adults’ career planning process and workplace experiences in the US and Japan.  He contributes to the scholarly community by

 Angelina Chin is Associate Professor of History at Pomona College. She received her Ph.D. in History (Feminist Studies) from UC Santa Cruz in 2006. Her research interests revolve around transformations of urban identity and citizenship, as well as transregional connections in China and Japan. Her 2012 book Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield), explores the concept of “women’s emancipation” in South China as well as new concerns about identity, consumption, governance and mobility. Her second book project is about displaced people who were in limbo in Hong Kong

Dr. Iddy Ramadhani Magoti holds a Diploma and BA in Education, and an MA and PhD in History. He was employed by the Tanzanian Ministry of Education as a secondary school teacher in 1998 before joining the Department of History at the University of Dar es Salaam as a tutorial assistant in 2007. After receiving his MA in November 2007, he was promoted to assistant lecturer. Since completing his PhD studies in 2017, he has been a lecturer in the Department of History of the University of Dar es Salaam. His research interests include conflict and conflict resolution, peace and

Godfrey Maringira is an associate professor of Anthropology at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa. He graduated with a PhD in sociology at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa in 2015. He is a senior Volkswagen Stiftung Foundation research fellow and is also a Principal Investigator of the International Development Research Center (IDRC) research on Gang violence in South Africa. Dr. Maringira is a two-time consecutive recipient of the SSRC’s Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa: Fieldwork and Completion Grant – 2012 and 2013, respectively. He is also a three-time recipient of the African Peacebuilding Network