Andrea Gevurtz Arai teaches Japan and East Asia anthropology and society courses in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.
Arai’s first book, The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (Stanford U. Press, 2016) is a long-term fieldwork study of how education and psychology came together under the conditions of long term recession, creating “child” centered problems, “neoliberal patriotic” solutions, altering cultural ideologies, and socially re-engineering the relation between education and labor. The Strange Child tracks the deleterious effects of this dramatically altered national-cultural environment on the recessionary generation as well as their creative responses.
Research/Teaching Areas: East Asia, Education and Labor, Altering cultural ideologies, Japan