Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Project Description

Acting Assistant Professor, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies

Ph.D. Columbia University (2004)

Faculty Profile

Andrea Gevurtz Arai teaches anthropology and society courses in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.

Arai’s first book, “The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan” (Stanford U. Press, 2016) is a long-term fieldwork study of how education and psychology came together under the conditions of long-term recession, creating “child”-centered problems and “neoliberal patriotic” solutions, altering cultural ideologies, and socially re-engineering the relation between education and labor. “The Strange Child” tracks the deleterious effects of this dramatically altered national-cultural environment on the recessionary generation, as well as their creative responses.

Arai has co-edited two volumes so far: “Global Futures in East Asia” (Stanford University Press, 2013), co-edited with Ann Anagnost, and “Space of Possibility In, Between and Beyond Korea and Japan,” co-edited with Clark Sorensen.

Arai is currently researching the Israeli social movement “Standing Together” (“Omdim B’yachad”- עומדים ביחד), which advocates for equal justice for Jewish and Arab Israelis and for the reallocation of tax dollars from the military to under-funded areas of social welfare, in particular health care, education and housing. This research will be included in Arai’s in-process edited volume, “Spaces of Creative Resistance in East Asia,” which looks at the local, cross-regional and international particularities of organizations of creative resistance, which advocate for social infrastructures, imagining and creating new forms of social and environmental sustainability.