DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Neurodiversity, Health, Activism, Classical/Modern Social Thoughts, Culture and Cognition, Social Phenomenology

Current Research

My dissertation focuses on the role of human-nonhuman interaction in neurodivergent population’s everyday social life, and aims to expand the understanding of social interaction to recognize and theorize nonhumans as legitimate interactants in our social world. Being neurodivergent is defined as people who are born with distinct neurodevelopmental traits/disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, epilepsy, etc. Besides, I’m also curious about how different cultures and institutional environments shape the roles of human-nonhuman interaction in helping the neurodivergent population adapt to difficulties in their cultural-specific socialization process. Therefore my research also compares cases from the United States, China and Japan to investigate the specific challenges the neurodivergent face in each society and how interacting with nonhumans helps them manage those difficulties strategically and emotionally. Apart from in-depth interviews, I will also be carrying out ethnographic observation in physical therapy centers, ACG (Anime, Comic and Games) fandom gatherings and animal cafes, which are considered in this research the most symbolic and/or unique activities involving nonhumans in each country.

I’m also writing a paper on activism in postwar Japan, which stems from my special field paper on the experience of collective identity in social movement. This paper attempts to transcend the agentic perspective on identity as shared meaning-making and the structural perspective as shared inequality. Reconceiving collective identity as a dynamic intentional structure developed from intersubjective lived experience of movement actors, this paper proposes that identity becomes comparable once we 1) consider it as consisting in four lines of movement consciousness oriented towards subjectivity-mutuality, rights-recognition, prevailing orders, and affordances, and 2) figure out how this intentional orientation is uneven among the four lines. I further argue that, empirically, identity construction should be conceived as the practices of perceiving and confirming mutual intentionality among activists, especially within their everyday experience of living with/in activism, which can be characterized into five flows of unmediated experience namely agency, efficacy, urgency, legitimacy and contingency. This paper also reveals that as the intersubjectivity developed in different flows (and intersection of flows) of experience in three phases, the intentional structure of postwar activists shifted from subjectivity to orders and later to rights and recognition, which showcases the changing trajectory of postwar activism from cultural movement to revolution and eventually to social movement.