This is a working paper published by the African Studies Center at Boston University.

This is an article published in the International Journal of African Historical Studies 52, no. 2 (2019): 301-310.

What is, or should be, the academic life? After many years of thinking about academic ideals to live by, and occasionally writing about academic standards and ethics, the author wrote this forthright series of three articles on the global essentials of the academic life and the universality of the university.

In this article, I contextualise the emergence and describe the political processes of a grassroots mobilisation against the structural violence of neoliberalism in Mexico in order to suggest the necessity of re-thinking conjunctural analysis in a posthegemonic direction. The National Assembly of the Environmentally Affected (ANAA) is a nationwide…[Read more]

Three articles originally published in the American electronic literary magazine Webgeist: 1) “Olympic Results Reflect Trajectory of Post-War Japan,” 2) “Language as a Window into Japanese Culture,” and 3) “Educational Rigors Begin Early in East Asia.” The series begins lightheartedly observing patterns in post-War Japanese society, secondly…[Read more]

In Castile, where the purity of blood supposedly did not allow the merchants access to the privileged, we found an extremely powerful and rich group, the Cargadores a Indias. This group was made up of international merchants, almost all from humble origins, in many cases converso, who rose socially in a vertiginous way. For this, they were…[Read more]

Nine various essays from 1999-2000 in The Education Companion Newsletter based in New York City: 1) “Culture Crossed” [humor], 2) “More Culture Crossed”; 3) “Making Real Haiku Poetry”; 4) “The Woman Diver: Discovering East Asian Values in a Buddhist Folktale”; 5) “Conducting Academic Conferences Online”; 6) “Motivating Interfaces for the 2000s”;…[Read more]

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right-wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg’s ur…[Read more]

How, why and under what conditions do new racial categories form? This dissertation examines the construction of South and Southeast Asian migrants (tongnama) as a new racial category in South Korea: a country in a continent long neglected within studies of race. Through ethnographic research on foreign migrant workers and marriage immigrants in…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]

The ability of the United States (U.S.) to influence policies in Colombia is indisputable. The U.S. is Colombia’s largest trading partner, and this alone provides the U.S. with great power with regards to Colombian policymaking. U.S. power is not only manifest within the economic realm, though, as Colombia is a consumer of many U.S. cultural p…[Read more]

Disrupting Maize undertakes a critical interrogation of the symbol and the staple food of the Mexican nation. As the centre of origin and genetic diversification of maize, the Mexican territory is regarded today as being under threat of irreversible ‘contamination’ by genetically engineered maize, an imported biotechnological product. When the fir…[Read more]

In the first section I provide a historical overview of structural violence, science studies, and feminism in Mexico. Structural violence appears first as the immediate context in which some Mexican scientists and academics have recently intensified their struggles to articulate “science” with social justice. Yet I offer a deeper account of how…[Read more]

Based on ethnographic research that is part of a larger project on the role of music and sound among migrant Moroccan men in Italy, this article focuses
on ‘L-ḥərraga’, a song that narrates the voyage and the experience of undocumented migration that ends with the tragic death of a young
Moroccan man crossing the Mediterranean. Through ‘L-ḥər…[Read more]

Japan Times guest editorials and selected letters from 1985-1990 on the Japanese as unique individuals, proposed school year reforms, an elegy for the Showa Emperor, biculturalism, and cultural liberation. Two photos from that period are included at the end: holding a friend’s scroll stamped with seals from each of the 88 temples of the Pilgrimage…[Read more]

Handout for a presentation at the Tech Day Plus regional conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) at Otemae University in Osaka Prefecture on September 28, 2013. Conservative and cautious institutional cultures can add to language barriers to limit the international recognition of a university’s accomplishments.…[Read more]

Western and Japanese educators face some of the same issues, even while their common-sense social organization and practices could hardly stand in greater contrast. Contentious issues in North America–such as core liberal arts requirements vs. vocationalization of higher education, the student as customer, or faculty treatment in terms of…[Read more]