The social science dissertation workshop returns after a month off.
Our next session is quite a departure from what we usually do--we reconvene on January 31* to hear from Taylor Cass Stevenson. She is writing up her MA thesis at International Christian University in Peace Studies (mainly sociocultural anthropology). She works on waste--garbage and so forth--and what people do with it. Taylor's field research was not in Japan but in Bhutan because the idea of waste as a practical and a cultural issue is pretty new there. Along with interviewing local notables and so forth, she organized workshops with children, and after demonstrating ways to reuse waste materials she had them write (or draw) their own images of various waste-related topics. She collected what they did, and one question she hopes our workshop can help with is how to use that sort of data in her research.

There is a broader methodological issue lurking here, I think. Taylor is doing "advocacy research": she is highly critical of how societies--modern and developing (India in particular)--deal with waste disposal as a matter of public policy as well as of customs and attitudes. She has ideas of how things should be done, and her research is one way to make an impact.

Since this topic might attract people who haven't come before, I'll mention that this workshop is designed for PhD students in social science but guests are welcome.
We always start with a half-hour presentation (no
slides) and then discuss for an hour about research design and problems as well as the topic itself. I'd appreciate it if you let me know if you are coming or not, though it isn't necessary.

John Campbell

*Meetings of the Shaken Social Science Dissertation Workshop start at
12 pm on Thursdays and go to 1:30 and sometimes beyond.
The Institute of Social Science provides coffee and tea and you are welcome to bring lunch. The location is a seminar room on the 5th floor in the Akamon General Research (Sougou Kenkyuu) Building. The building is down a little passage to the right after you come through Akamon, or you can go through the grounds of Ito Hall off Hongou Douri. It is Bldg 38 on this map:

http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/about/documents/Hongo_Campu
sMap_E.pdf

__________________________

>From John Creighton Campbell
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
University of Michigan
Visiting Scholar, Institute of Gerontology Tokyo University jccamp at umich.edu