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March 21, 2012

[SSJ: 7294] Reminder: Recreating the Public and Private in Japan; Workshop, Sophia U., March 22nd

From: David H. Slater
Date: 2012/03/21

The Japan Fieldwork Workshop invites you to an interesting presentation....

Paper People and Digital Memory:
Recreating the Public and Private in Japan

Meghan Sarah Fidler
PhD Candidate, Sociocultural Anthropology Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (Affiliated at Sophia)

Sophia University, Yotsuya Campus
Bldg. 10, room 301
Thursday, March 22nd
6:30-8pm.
Access: http://www.fla.sophia.ac.jp/about/location

Lecture in English (Japanese discussion welcome) Free and open to all; no registration necessary

(We usually go out for a beer around the corner after presentations--and again, all are welcome.)


Abstract:
This project tracks the use of documents during daily interactions in Tokyo, Japan in order to understand the ways culture, language, and technology interact to form identities and memories. This project approaches the use of digital and paper media by incorporating them into real time social interaction as literacies.
By reconceptualizing the routine engagement and exchange of documents as literacies which contain culturally meaningful identity markers, I account for how groups of people actively engage social memory.
Based on eleven months of fieldwork conducting a questionnaire, interviews, and participant-observation with students, this project evaluates a number of elements important to modern life: the perception of 'public' and 'private' spaces, gendered writing, and time (including holidays and elapsed message time), evoking contemporary writing practices as a means to create images self and society in student interaction during the process. Accounting for social interactions in their exiting continuum of multimedia is not only for essential for understanding local engagement with technology in social life, it reflects global communication concerns including, but not limited to, cross-cultural miscommunication or government access and control of communication technologies. Findings will reflect upon privacy concerns, a construction of public places, and memory.

***

Meghan Sarah Fidler is a Sociocultural PhD Candidate from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. From 2008-2010 Mrs. Fidler worked as the editorial assistant for Jonathan Hill, editor of the journal Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power. Her recent conference work includes a 2010 presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder Asian Studies Graduate Association Conference entitled "Writing on Writing:
the Palimpsest of Practice in the Creation of Documents in Japan;"
work extending from her Master's Thesis "Seeing the light in the CSI effect: Co-construction in Law, Science, and Society," presented at the Central States Anthropological Society 2009 conference, Champaign- Urbana, Illinois; and "Experiencing Shoes through
Facebook: Exploring Online Interaction and Memory,"
presented in the Finding Bridges Anthropology Forum, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois in 2009.

JAPAN FIELDWORK WORKSHOP, now in our 12th year, is an open forum for those who are doing fieldwork in any discipline. It is designed to give scholars of any status a chance to present work in progress and to get feedback on the content, methods and possible directions of their research.


--
David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Faculty of Liberal Arts
Sophia University, Tokyo

Approved by ssjmod at 11:43 AM