JAPANESE STUDIES
ANTIRACIST PEDAGOGY
The Japanese Studies Antiracist Pedagogy Project, which centers BIPOC graduate students and faculty as key partners and co-organizers of this intellectual enterprise, is designed to develop a forum for discussing and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of Japanese Studies. The project’s aim is to enhance awareness and quality of teaching related to DEI issues within Japanese Studies, with an explicit emphasis on antiracist pedagogy as the basis for public-facing humanities research and professional development for graduate students.
Our products are tools for enacting antiracist pedagogy at multiple levels: through podcast interviews, digitized learning resources, and antiracist syllabi. In doing so, we can begin to apply a decolonizing approach to educational practices and spaces in our field and in the academy at large to help redress pervasive ideological and methodological biases and help students and scholars from underrepresented backgrounds succeed.
Explore the
Origin Stories Podcast
We thank the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan for their generous funding support, without which this project would not be possible.
Land Acknowledgment
The University of Michigan sits on the traditional and contemporary homelands of The Three Fires People (The Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) and the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee and Wyandot Nations.
The acquisition of this land was largely facilitated through the Treaty of Fort Meigs signed in the Fall of 1817 between native tribe chiefs and U.S. governors Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur. This treaty in no way negates the indigenous origins of the land we now know as the Lower Peninsula.
As our project aims to recognize, redress, and decolonize Japanese Studies and other transdisciplinary academic spaces, it is imperative we continue to learn about the enduring history of the university site and its relationship with indigenous history.