In 2021, Andrea Gevurtz Arai, Acting Assistant Professor, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and Jeff Hou, Professor, College of Built Environments, were awarded a Research Award through the Global Innovation Fund by the Office of Global Affairs. The Global Innovation Fund supports transformative cross-college, cross-continent global research, teaching, and learning experiences at the University of Washington.
With additional funding support from the East Asia Center, UW Japan Studies Program, Department of Landscape Architecture, UW College of Built Environments, UW China Studies Program, UW Center for Korea Studies, UW Taiwan Studies Program, and UW Center for Global Studies, Andrea Gevurtz Arai and Jeff Hou hosted a virtual conference in 2022 to bring together a cross-regional, interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, and artists from across East Asia focused on different forms of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, wealth inequality and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment. This project was the first of its kind at the UW, a collaboration between a cultural anthropologist of Japan (and East Asia) and a Taiwanese landscape architect, and gathered an interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, and individuals involved in different forms of social change.
Following the conference, Andrea Gevurtz Arai edited the papers and compiled them into chapters, including two additional papers from two of her graduate students, to create a volume that will be published this month by Rutgers University Press, Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First Century East Asia. Andrea Gevurtz Arai wrote the introduction and also contributed a chapter. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday, making more liveable presents and more possible futures. A teaching appendix is available at the end to support educators across the U.S. and East Asia in bringing this volume into their classrooms.
The Conference
The conference was originally supposed to take place in person in 2021, but given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it ultimately took place virtually in 2022. Jeff Hou and Andrea Gevurtz Arai invited a range of voices from across East Asia – from scholars, scholar activists, and artists – to present papers on the true politics of the everyday. Some of the participants were young people writing about other young people, while others were scholars writing about what young people are doing to challenge the status quo.
It’s an interesting collection of stories of change that we don’t usually hear from the bottom up, from the grassroots, about what’s happening in East Asia.
Andrea Gevurtz Arai also invited her students to participate in the conference, which resulted in two of them writing papers that would be included in the volume and one of them collaborating with Andrea Gevurtz Arai on the teaching appendix. Students in her classes who have read the papers are particularly interested in learning from their peers in East Asia about how to build a society in which you want to live in.
The Volume
The volume is divided into three sections – Creative Acts of Resistance, Cultural Spaces and Community Places, and Environments of Creative Resistance – and draws from the experiences of scholars, scholar activists, and artists in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. From young people in Korea who are creating and living in village communities to foster a sense of belonging, to an organization in Japan committed to preserving a historic local cinema, to a social enterprise dedicated to revitalizing community and gathering spaces in Taiwan, the volume captures the breadth and depth of how youth are engaging in social action and creative space-making in East Asia.
This volume is about people’s lives right now, the history of those lives, the politics of those lives, and how social change movements materialize in the everyday.
This volume presents a new and updated picture of East Asian societies. In the midst of a world in turmoil, facing a range of environmental, economic and social problems, young people are coming together to create something new, something of their own, sharing across national-cultural borders, learning from each other, revaluing their labor and their built and natural environments, in and from the center and peripheries.
To learn more about the impact of this volume, join Andrea Gevurtz Arai this summer at an event at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle or attend her talk at the East Asia Center at the UW in October.
Andrea Gevurtz Arai
Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist and acting assistant professor in The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (Stanford U Press, 2016) and the co-editor of Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Stanford U Press, 2013), and Spaces of Possibility, Korea and Japan: In, Between and Beyond the Nation (UW Press, 2016). Andrea Gevurtz Arai was also the Interim chair of Korea Studies (2023-24). She is completing a second ethnographic monograph entitled: The 3.11 Generation: Changing the Subjects of Gender, Labor and Environment in Trans-Local Japan.