Disrupting Maize undertakes a critical interrogation of the symbol and the staple food of the Mexican nation. As the centre of origin and genetic diversification of maize, the Mexican territory is regarded today as being under threat of irreversible ‘contamination’ by genetically engineered maize, an imported biotechnological product. When the fir…[Read more]

Disrupting Maize undertakes a critical interrogation of the symbol and the staple food of the Mexican nation. As the centre of origin and genetic diversification of maize, the Mexican territory is regarded today as being under threat of irreversible ‘contamination’ by genetically engineered maize, an imported biotechnological product. When the fir…[Read more]

In the first section I provide a historical overview of structural violence, science studies, and feminism in Mexico. Structural violence appears first as the immediate context in which some Mexican scientists and academics have recently intensified their struggles to articulate “science” with social justice. Yet I offer a deeper account of how…[Read more]

Based on ethnographic research that is part of a larger project on the role of music and sound among migrant Moroccan men in Italy, this article focuses
on ‘L-ḥərraga’, a song that narrates the voyage and the experience of undocumented migration that ends with the tragic death of a young
Moroccan man crossing the Mediterranean. Through ‘L-ḥər…[Read more]

Based on ethnographic research that is part of a larger project on the role of music and sound among migrant Moroccan men in Italy, this article focuses
on ‘L-ḥərraga’, a song that narrates the voyage and the experience of undocumented migration that ends with the tragic death of a young
Moroccan man crossing the Mediterranean. Through ‘L-ḥər…[Read more]

‘L-ʿalwa’, a sung poem whose text recounts the pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine in Morocco, is celebrated for its ability to convey images and emotions stirred up by the sacred journey. As part of the repertory of ʿaita—a genre of sung poetry from the Moroccan plains and plateaus traditionally performed by professional female singer-danc…[Read more]

Japan Times guest editorials and selected letters from 1985-1990 on the Japanese as unique individuals, proposed school year reforms, an elegy for the Showa Emperor, biculturalism, and cultural liberation. Two photos from that period are included at the end: holding a friend’s scroll stamped with seals from each of the 88 temples of the Pilgrimage…[Read more]

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in whi…[Read more]

Distributed ledger technology and the development of digital smart contracts have the potential for a new disruptive technology. Applications based on them could find their way into the management of many areas of every day life. However, they also carry certain risks for sustainable development of our society. This paper is intended as a…[Read more]

Handout for a presentation at the Tech Day Plus regional conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) at Otemae University in Osaka Prefecture on September 28, 2013. Conservative and cautious institutional cultures can add to language barriers to limit the international recognition of a university’s accomplishments.…[Read more]

Western and Japanese educators face some of the same issues, even while their common-sense social organization and practices could hardly stand in greater contrast. Contentious issues in North America–such as core liberal arts requirements vs. vocationalization of higher education, the student as customer, or faculty treatment in terms of…[Read more]

Outline of a frank presentation on the role of education in Japan to American college observers in 2006.

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

Gabor Lukacs’ 2008 book on “Kaitai Shinsho: The Single Most Famous Japanese Book of Medicine & Geka Sōden: An Early Very Important Manuscript on Surgery” is a bibliographical contribution to the comparative history of the introduction of Western science in East Asia. It focuses on two illustrated manuals of anatomy and surgery in Japanese, adap…[Read more]

In ancient China, portentology was a “science” in its own right, a specialised field of knowledge developed by rational individuals who endeavoured to fathom the concealed mechanisms at work beneath the spectacles of history and the world at large. This paper focuses on the nomenclature of portents (observed phenomena interpreted as auspicious or…[Read more]

This article explores three facets of green space within a medieval monastic context: its origin, its effects and properties and the way it was shaped into an expression of power. We learn a great deal about the history of green space through the nuances of monastic thought and vice versa. The term ‘green space’ in a medieval context may ini…[Read more]

A multilingual podcast, recorded in August 2005 by native speakers of English, Japanese, and Chinese, found proverbs with a similar meaning in each culture. The author arranged this podcast during a Translation class between Japanese and English with fourth year students at Shinonome University in Matsuyama, on Shikoku island in Western Japan.

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

“Buddho-Taoism” is a neologism that appeared in Western academic discourse during the late nineteen-forties, was put to various uses without being consensually defined, enjoyed a brief vogue around the turn of the twenty-first century, and began to fall from grace in recent years. This neologism implicitly created new epistemic repertoires der…[Read more]