Recently in Careers Category

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that my book Deaf in Japan (Cornell University Press) was awarded the 2008 John Whitney Hall Prize at the Association for Asian Studies 2008 Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

Below is a photo of me with my wonderful editor, Roger Haydon, of Cornell University Press at the conference.

I recently wrote a short article for the Anthropology News titled: A Case against Giving Informants Cameras and Coming Back Weeks Later (. Vol. 49, No. 2: 20). Here is a snippet to whet your appetite:

A Case Against Giving Informants Cameras and Coming Back Weeks Later
By Karen Nakamura (Yale U)

Giving informants cameras and asking them to take photographs of their environment is a growing trend in anthropology. The resulting photos are later displayed, analyzed or exhibited as examples of a particularly internal, private or emic view of the world. Students love this technique, which is inexpensive and initially appears to be risk-free, with all of the hallmarks of reflexive anthropology. If not done carefully, however, it can be problematic both ethically and methodologically.

.....

For those who choose to do photoethnographic work that involves providing informants with cameras or video equipment, it is essential to first critically examine the ethical and methodological implications of a project. The anthropologist must consider both the potential harms and benefits that a project might pose for an informant. Possible ways to address these concerns include giving informants high quality photographic equipment (to keep) as well as technical training, so that in the future they can use their new tools and skills for their own purposes, to address their own needs. Informants working for an anthropologists (i.e. completing assigned tasks) should be paid as field assistants. Prior to using an image an anthropologist should receive permission to do so from both the photographer and any people that appear in the photograph. Finally, photography should supplement, not replace, long-term fieldwork–it is time and labor intensive, but ultimately necessary for interpreting and contextualizing visual images from the field.

You can read the rest at the full text PDF.

Comments, criticism, and feedback on this article are more than welcome -- either here or by e-mail.

Hot off the press, Apple just released Mac OS X 10.4.11, otherwise a minor update to the last OS release. I haven't upgraded to PantherCheetahLionLeopard yet (since Yale has a site license and I have to wait until I'm back in the USA) -- but the big thing about 10.4.11 is that it supports the Microsoft Presenter Mouse 8000 -- which I've blogged about before.

Yippee! Keynote here I come!

For more: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306297

I gave a lot of talks last year.... at Harvard, Columbia, UBC, NYU and Purdue. I think it's mostly due to my book coming out last year.

I usually talk using Apple Keynote. I rarely read my talks from a written paper and speak semi-extemporaneously. I use the Keynote "presenter display" which gives me my speaker's notes for each slide, a preview of the next slide, and a timer. I think Microsoft PowerPoint has a similar feature. You need a PowerBook or Mac Book Pro to make the "presenter display" function because the lower models can only mirror what's on the data projector and can't give you a separate screen.

UIC's program in disability studies is excellent (and there's a new minor at UCLA after the jump):

PLEASE CIRCULATE THE FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT TO ALL WHO MAY BE INTERESTED:

The Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Disability Studies at the University 

of Illinois at Chicago is accepting applications from prospective students 

for Fall 2008. The deadline for receipt of full applications is January 1, 

2008. UIC's Disability Studies Ph.D. program promotes the development of 

new scholarly models for understanding disability. Part of this 

intellectual approach involves the education of disabled and non-disabled 

academicians, researchers, policy experts, and clinicians who will join 

with disabled people in the community as active challengers of oppressive 

institutions and environments. The program examines how addressing 

disability in its full complexity can promote the full participation, self- 

determination, and equal citizenship of people with disabilities in society.

From my inbox:

ALL FOR APPLICATIONS: THE 2008 PAUL G. HEARNE/AAPD LEADERSHIP AWARDS (due:
Sept. 21, 2007)

The Paul G. Hearne/AAPD Leadership Awards program was established to
identify and support emerging leaders with disabilities who will carry on
the disability rights movement. Administered by AAPD and sponsored by the
Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation, the 2008 Paul G. Hearne/AAPD
Leadership Awards identifies up to two emerging leaders with disabilities to
each receive $10,000 to help them continue their progress as leaders. These
individuals will also have an opportunity to meet and network with national
disability leaders at the annual AAPD Leadership Gala in Washington, DC in
the spring. Applications are available from www.AAPD.com
. Apply by: Friday, September 21, 2007.

We're starting to see a trickle of e-mails from newly minted BAs who -- having experienced a week of the Real World® -- are terrified and want to go back to the ivory towers of academia.

I think most faculty encourage prospective graduate students to contact them. One of the most important things in graduate school is a good working relationship with your mentor/advisee/chair. It behooves you to contact faculty who are working in the same geographical or topical areas at potential universities to see if they might be interested in your research project.

However..... and this must be said .... don't forget that you should be on your best behavior as well as most formal when writing to faculty that you don't know. This means writing your initial contact letter as if it were a paper letter.

Yesterday was Yale's graduation ceremony. I attended for the first time since my own graduation in 2001. We had an excellent crop of graduate students who are going on to do exciting things.

I just finished reading part of Rob Knop's blog about his tenure denial at Vanderbilt University. It makes me aware of just how difficult the job market is and that getting a PhD is just the first step on a long and difficult road: http://scienceblogs.com/interactions/2007/05/the_astronomy_community_to_rob.php

A prospective doctoral student interested in the anthropology of Japan recently inquired about what schools I'd recommend. I posted a list last year but thought I'd update it for 2007:

Ph.D. Granting Institutions with Japan Faculty)

• Canada: University of British Columbia - Prof. Millie Creighton
• USA: Boston University - Prof. Merry White
• USA: Columbia University - Prof. Marilyn Ivy
• USA: Duke University - Prof. Anne Allison
• USA: Harvard University - Prof. Theodore Bestor
• USA: Stanford University - Prof. Miyako Inoue
• USA: University of Hawai'i (Manoa) - Prof. Christine Yano
• USA: University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) - Profs. Nancy Abelmann and Karen Kelsky
• USA: University of Iowa - Prof. Scott Schnell
• USA: University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) - Prof. Jennifer Robertson
• USA: Yale University - Profs. William Kelly, Karen Nakamura*

* Italics = denotes junior faculty member who may or may not be taking on graduate students.

M.A. Programs

• USA: Yale University, MA in East Asian Studies
• Japan: Sophia University, Interdisciplinary MA in Japanese Studies - Prof. David Slater
• Japan: Waseda University - Prof. Glenda Roberts

I'll keep updating this list, if you have any suggestions, additions, corrections, feel free to e-mail me or drop a comment below. Last updated: 2007/09/23

One piece of important information that you should have before entering into salary negotiations is the AAUP national salary survey. This gives average figures for assistant / associate / and full professors at schools across the country. Even community colleges are counted.

Note that the figures for schools with large business schools, law schools, or engineering schools are usually inflated as faculty in those divisions tend to make more than those in the humanities or social sciences.

Also, you need to ask whether your school is paying you on a nine-month salary or a twelve-month. AAUP adjusts all of their data to 9-month salaries, so if the school is offering you US$120,000 for a 12 month salary (let me know where!), AAUP will count it as "only" getting US$90,000.

AAUP survey: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/

This is something I've been meaning to blog about for a while, but I'm going paperless in my office. I've been scanning down my large library of photocopied journal articles and reducing them to PDFs which I store on my RAID network area server. It's a slow process, but I'd like to be done by the end of the semester which is when we're moving office spaces (again).

My current workflow is:

1. Scan using a Fujitsu ScapSnap
   
2. OCR using Adobe Acrobat
   
3. Index using Spotlight
   
4. Rinse, repeat.
   

Adobe Acrobat 7.0 for the Mac is buggy and has problems with some of the PDFs that ScanSnap generates, so I'm looking forward to seeing if Acrobat 8 solves them. I haven't been able to find other good OCR solutions for batch processing PDFs so if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

One of my friends (B.B.) has a favorite saying that I particularly like: Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice.

I recently received an e-mail from Professor Torneby of the University of Oslo asking me to advertise one of their summer courses in visual anthropology:

Dear Karen Nakamura,

I would be very thankful if you provided information about this PhD courses to take place in Norway this coming summer, on your blog:

Course title: Contemporary Art and Anthropology:
Challenges of Theory and Practice
Lecturer: Associate Professor Arnd Schneider,
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
Main disciplines: Anthropology, Fine Arts, Media Studies
Secondary disciplines: Art History/Criticism, Cultural Studies
Dates: 30. July - 3. August 2007
Location, University of Oslo, Norway
Course Credits: 10 pts (ECTS)
Limitation: 30 participants
Detailed information and online application:
http://www.sv.uio.no/oss/index.html

Course objectives:
This course will look at recent border crossings between art and anthropology, and explore the epistemological challenges arising from it. Following the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’, contemporary artists have adopted an ‘anthropological’ gaze, including methodologies, such as fieldwork, in their appropriation of other cultures. Anthropologists, on the other hand, in the wake of the ‘writing culture’ critique of the 1980s, are starting to explore new forms of visual research and representation beyond written texts.

This course will explore the potential for future collaborations between art and anthropology. The curriculum will be based on an examination of key texts, and review of a number of paradigmatic artists and issues (such as, fieldwork/ site-specific ethnography, appropriation, research in and representation of different sensual domains/’synaesthesia’).

In its workshops and assessment options the course encourages presentation and submission of practice-based visual work.

The course format is lectures and workshops, in which students are encouraged to present their work in progress.

The course is interdisciplinary and directed at doctoral students and researchers in the social sciences, humanities, and in the visual arts (including anthropology/visual anthropology, sociology, art criticism, art history, fine arts, film practice and studies, design, media practice and cultural studies).
Best regards,

Tron Harald Torneby
The Faculty of Social Sciences
The University of Oslo
P.O.Box 1084 Blindern
NO-0317 Oslo
Norway
************************************
Oslo Summer School in Comparative
Social Sciences Studies 2007
http://www.sv.uio.no/oss/index.html
************************************

I was asked the other day by a graduate student about how to get published by a university press. I thought the easiest thing to do was to post the letter that I wrote to Cornell University Press back in 2003 proposing the book that eventually became Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity.

November 14, 2003 Roger Haydon Senior Editor Cornell University Press Sage House 512 East State Street Ithaca NY 14850 Dear Mr. Haydon: I enjoyed meeting you earlier this year at the Asian Studies conference. I regret that we did not have the opportunity to talk further in depth about the manuscript that I am currently working on and apologize for the delay in sending you the proposal. Cornell University Press has a reputation for cutting edge work in Asian Studies that blends political science, ethnography and history. I am excited by the opportunity of working with you on this project. That’s Sign Fascism!: The Conflict Over Deaf Identity and Sign Language in Contemporary Japan is the story of the development of deaf communities, minority identities, and political movements. It is designed to be able to be read in introductory Japanese culture and history, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Deaf Studies, and Disability Studies, courses as well as focused topic courses in those areas. In my book, I trace the history and development of deaf identity from the turn of the 19th century, linking deaf identity with early Showa and post-War modernization and industrialization discourses. I embed oral histories (well... in reality they were signed histories) from deaf women in the different generational cohorts to illustrate how larger social and political forces have shaped individual life stories. The title refers to a comment made by one of the leaders within the somewhat assimilationist (albeit communist-inflected) Japanese Federation of the Deaf. She was incensed by the new generation of deaf activists who were adopting an American-style, radical, separationist deaf identity. The youth activists were claiming that they were the true bearers of a “pure JSL” (Japanese Sign Language) and attempting to control the lexicon and grammar through various means. The book ends by exploring how the language wars around Japanese signing are evidence of changing generational attitudes towards disability, identity, and culture in Japan. Written for advanced undergraduates and interested laypeople, this ethnography appeals to several readerships. Deafness has characteristics of both ethnic minority as well as disability status. Those interested in minority groups in Japan will be attracted to my explicit analysis and comparison of the deaf against other Japanese minority groups (including the Burakumin and zainichi Koreans). As you may know, several volumes on minorities in Japan have come out in the past several years, indicating that this is increasingly an area of scholarly interest. Sonia Ryang’s recent edited volume on Koreans in Japan, the slate of books on Brazilian Nikkeijin, and the interest in Okinawan studies all point to minority studies as an area of growth in Japan Studies and Asian Studies. My book also contributes to the growing field of Deafness and Disability Studies. While there are numerous texts on deaf communities in Western contexts, there are not many books that deal with deafness or disability cross-culturally. My co-edited volume Many Ways to be Deaf (Gallaudet University Press) released this summer has already sold 300 units in the first month, according to my most recent royalty statement. This is as a $70 344-page hardcover volume with little advertising. I have no doubt that a paperback monograph on deafness in Japan will have much broader appeal in deaf and disability studies, similar to Nora Groce’s (1988) classic Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language (Harvard U Press), which is ranked 78,000th in Amazon.com and which has gone back to print several times. In terms of CUP publications, I would situate my text between Ellis Krauss’ Broadcasting Politics in Japan and Joshua Roth’s Brokered Homeland. I’m enclosing a table of contents and the first two chapters for your consideration. Please also find enclosed a reprint of my Social Sciences Japan Journal article, which was awarded the 2003 ISS/Oxford University Press Award for Modern Japanese Studies and is based on a chapter of this book. I would like to sign a contract at your earliest convenience with the manuscript to be submitted by May 2004. As I will be working on a new project by August 2004 funded through the Abe Fellowship, I have considerable incentive to finish this project by the end of next summer. Sincerely, Karen Nakamura Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology Macalester College

So I'm starting to get the first round of ding letters from the various film festivals that I applied to last year.* One of the things I hadn't realized going into this was just how competitive the film festival market is. One festival I applied to received 1700 films, and they could screen less than a hundred (including shorts).

*In the next few months, we're also sending ding/acceptance letters for job searches as well as applications to the PhD program.

This means that the chances of getting into a film festival (assuming random probability, which it isn't) is 1:17. That would mean it's harder to get into a competitive film festival than it is to get into Yale College! :-)

Here are some other acceptance to application ratios in my experience: Yale anthropology PhD program 1:20; academic journal ratio 1:5 (?roughly¿); anthro teaching job 1:150. So getting into a film festival isn't as hard as getting a job, but ranks up there!