Researching Radical Politics in Japan: The Personal in the Political and the Past in the Present

Join the College of Liberal Arts and History Soirée for a talk by Dr. Chelsea Szendi Schieder, professor of Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. This talk will discuss Dr. Schieder’s research journey studying and writing about the student movement, radical politics, and gender theory in Japan to open up a larger conversation on the role of personal experience in political movements and knowledge creation. Dr. Schieder will use examples from her research on gender and social movements to explore ways that we in the present can look to the past for clues about future possibilities.

In particular, she will share what she learned from examining the political meanings created by female participation in leftist campus-based protest in the 1960s in Japan, which illuminate gendered dynamics that help us understand postwar Japanese politics and the complicated legacies of radical protest in Japan. This historical research has also shaped how she understands the role of scholarship and scholars in demanding reform, and how she understands the importance of empathy and solidarity in politics and scholarship.

Join us for this discussion on Zoom.

Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Ph.D. Columbia University, East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2014) is a Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. She writes about protest, women, violence, and Japan for academic and general audiences, with articles in Dissent, The Nation, and Sekai. Her 2021 book Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left (Duke UP) contextualizes the gendered meaning of the female student activist in postwar Japanese society and social movements. She is currently researching networks of activists and institutions in postwar Japan in two projects, one of which focuses on "grassroots archives" and another in which she traces networks across labor movements, extractive industries, and local community groups to understand energy production and consumption and ideas of progress, discrimination, and "the environment" in Japan and the world in the mid- to late-20th century.