Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 1:15-3:00 pm ET
Room 505, Elliott School of International Affairs
About the event:
Join us for a focused discussion on research from the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), exploring the critical intersection of racism and nationalism in Asian contexts. As Asia becomes increasingly central to the global economy and culture, it faces significant challenges, including rising inequality, cultural intolerance, and institutional shortcomings. SNAPL is committed to addressing these issues through interdisciplinary, evidence-based, and policy-relevant research. This event will highlight SNAPL’s discourse analysis of reports submitted by 16 Asian countries to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The research investigates how race and racism are conceptualized in these reports, uncovering patterns of “denial” and exploring how these perspectives align with or diverge from those in other global contexts. The discussion will also examine how historical identities and dominant social, political, and religious values shape national understandings of race in Asia. We aim to foster a deeper understanding of racism, often underdiscussed in the region, and promote the critical dialogue necessary for building a socially and culturally mature “Next Asia.” Two distinguished discussants—Dr. Hiromi Ishizawa from George Washington University and Dr. Erin Aeran Chung from Johns Hopkins University—will join us to share their insights, ensuring a lively and engaging conversation on these pressing issues.
About the Speakers
Junki Nakahara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), housed within the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Her research interests include nationalism and xenophobia, critical and cultural studies, feminist (digital) media studies, and postcolonial/decolonial international relations. As an inaugural member of SNAPL, she leads the “Nationalism and Racism” research track, focusing on two major projects: (1) Racism “Denial” in Asian State Party Reports to the UN CERD, and (2) Elite Articulation of “Multiculturalism” in Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis and computational textual analysis, the team examines how nationalism and racism intertwine to create various forms of suppression and intolerance across the Asia-Pacific region, where entanglements among race, ethnicity, nation, and postcoloniality complicate the related debates.
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After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Hiromi Ishizawa spent two years as a post-doctoral research associate at the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in the areas of social and family demography, immigration, sociology of language, and urban sociology. Her research focuses on the understanding of how immigrants integrate into American society. In particular, her work emphasizes the influence of context, such as family and neighborhood, on the process of integration. She has published work that examines many aspects of immigrant integration, including minority language maintenance, civic participation, health, sequence of migration within family units, intermarriage, and residential settlement patterns among minority language speakers.
