The middle classes in most advanced economies today are frequently described as being “squeezed” and “shrinking.”  Hagen Koo’s recent book, Privilege and Anxiety, examines what has happened to the Korean middle class in the era of rapid globalization and demonstrates that the middle class experiences far more complex changes than usually assumed. Koo argues that globalization inserts an axis of polarization into the middle class, separating a small minority that benefits from the globalized economy and a large majority that suffers from it. This internal differentiation generates new class dynamics, as the newly affluent seek to distinguish themselves from the rest of the middle class and establish a new, privileged class position. The rest of the middle class tries to follow the affluent’s class practices, suffering great anxieties and frustrations. The middle class thus turns into an arena of intense class distinction struggles, bringing great anxieties to both the affluent and the lower segments of the middle.

 

Hagen Koo is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Born in Korea, Koo received his BA in Korea and briefly worked as a journalist before coming to America where he received a PhD at Northwestern University. He has published extensively on economic development and social change in South Korea. His major work includes Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation (Cornell University Press, 2001). After his retirement in 2017, he spends more time in Korea studying the changing social fabric of Korean society in the global era. Privilege and Anxiety (Cornell University Press, 2022) represents his most recent work.

Discussants:

Alek Sigley is a PhD student at Stanford University's Modern Thought and Literature program, where he is writing a dissertation on North Korea. From 2018-2019 he studied for a master's degree in contemporary North Korean fiction at Kim Il Sung University's College of Literature. He speaks Mandarin, Korean and Japanese. Follow him on Twitter @AlekSigley.

Elisa Kim is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at Stanford University. Her dissertation theorizes on racialization by systematically investigating the portrayal of minority groups in South Korean newspapers across time using computational methods. Prior to the PhD, she majored in Asian American Studies at Pomona College and has an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford, researching the relational landscape of North Korean human rights organizations.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

May 24, 5:00 p.m - 6:30 p.m. PT / May 25, 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. JT

The advancement of women in the workplace has been an elusive goal in Japan for decades. The shrinking and aging population call for a change in gender expectations that would enable Japan to tap women’s talents for economic growth, but many hurdles continue to block progress in gender equity in the workplace and at home. In this session, two experts who have led the efforts to increase women in leadership positions discuss the accomplishments and future challenges in enhancing gender diversity and inclusion in Japanese organizations. 

Panelists

Mika Nabeshima has held several global assignments since joining Tokio Marine headquarters in 1991,
She established her career in claims, working with clients to resolve liability and property claims, provide risk management solutions, manage litigation, and fight fraudulent claims.
After seven years at Tokio Marine America, she became general manager of human resources at TMHD in 2019 and then added the role of Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, becoming the company’s first female C-suite officer, in April 2021.

Mika is responsible for Tokio Marine’s global HR strategy, from talent management and development to diversity & inclusion initiatives, governance of group companies, and ensuring the safety of expats around the world.
She graduated from Davidson College (North Carolina) with a B.A. in Political Science in 1991. 

 

Naomi Koshi is a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and former mayor of Otsu City. From 2002 to 2011, Naomi practiced corporate law at Nishimura & Asahi in Tokyo and Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. From 2010 to 2011, Naomi was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia Business School.  In 2012, Naomi was elected mayor of Otsu City and served a total of eight years. As the youngest female mayor, Naomi successfully expanded Otsu's childcare system, thus making it easier for many Japanese women to return to the workforce. Naomi is admitted to practice law in Japan, New York, and California and is now a partner at Miura & Partners. In 2021, Naomi Co-Founded OnBoard K.K., a company specializing in diversifying Japanese corporate boards. Naomi also serves as an outside director of V-Cube, Inc and SoftBank Corp. She holds multiple degrees from Hokkaido University and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

Moderator

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is also Director of the Japan Program. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, 2021). 

 

This event is part of the 2022 Spring webinar series, Negotiating Women's Rights and Gender Equality in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

In this talk, prominent political activist Sanaa Seif and award-winning journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous will discuss the current political conditions in Egypt, the massive expansion of the carceral state under the rule of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and the country’s role within the geopolitical shifts reshaping the region. At the heart of the conversation will be the newly released book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, authored by Seif's brother Alaa Abdel-Fattah, one of the most high-profile political prisoners in Egypt. The book will be available for purchase at the event.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sanaa Seif is an Egyptian filmmaker, producer, and political activist. She has been imprisoned three times under the Sisi regime for her activism, most recently from the summer of 2020 until December 2021, when she was abducted by security forces after trying to get a letter in to her brother in prison. Hundreds of cultural figures and dozens of institutions campaigned for her release.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. For eight years he worked as a producer and correspondent for the TV/radio news hour Democracy Now! In 2011, he returned to Egypt to cover the revolution. Since then, he has reported for a number of print and broadcast outlets from across the region. He received an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media for his coverage of the Egyptian revolution and an Emmy award for his coverage of the Donald Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. He is currently an editor and reporter at Mada Masr, Egypt's leading independent media outlet.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.​

Using 'big data' computational techniques to scrutinize cases covering 2009–2016 from all 252 basic-level courts in two Chinese provinces, Henan and Zhejiang, Ethan Michelson reveals that women have borne the brunt of a dramatic intensification since the mid-2000s of a decades-long practice of denying divorce requests. This talk discusses key findings from his new book of the same name. Michelson's analysis of almost 150,000 divorce trials reveals routine and egregious violations of China's own laws upholding the freedom of divorce, gender equality, and the protection of women's physical security. Michelson takes the reader upstream to the institutional sources of China's clampdown on divorce and downstream to its devastating and highly gendered human toll, showing how judges in an overburdened court system clear their oppressive dockets at the expense of women's lawful rights and interests.

Ethan Michelson is the James and Noriko Gines Department Chair in East Asian Languages and Cultures as well as Professor of Sociology and Law at Indiana University Bloomington, where he has been teaching courses on law and society, law and authoritarianism, and contemporary Chinese society since 2003. He has won several awards for his published research on China’s legal system.

Join the REDI Task Force for the next event in our "Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs" series as we examine policing and criminalization.

Activist calls to "defund the police" have catalyzed new conversations about the function and purpose of policing. Yet the realities of policing and criminalization, as a function of a state-apparatus that protect power and private property, are varied and complex. Beyond the day-to-day experiences of traffic violations or emergency calls, policing can be expanded to analyze institutions and communal experiences of criminalization - from the military to schooling to struggles for democracy. One broad area of agreement is the disproportionate harm that policing and criminalization has on marginalized and dispossessed populations, from Black schoolchildren to vigilantism in a post-apartheid state. This panel will travel the globe, describing specific cases in Africa, the U.S., and Latin America, articulating the connections between state violence, criminalization, and policing.

This online event is free and open to the public.

Speaker bios:

Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth-century. 

Subini Annamma is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives can inform teacher and special education. Dr. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color and has won the 2019 AESA Critic’s Choice Book Award & 2018 NWSA Alison Piepmeier Book Prize. Dr. Annamma is a past Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, AERA Division G Early Career Awardee, Critical Race Studies in Education Associate Emerging Scholar recipient, Western Social Science Association's Outstanding Emerging Scholar, and AERA Minority Dissertation Awardee. Dr. Annamma’s work has been published in scholarly journals such as Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, Review of Research in Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Theory Into Practice, Race Ethnicity and Education, Qualitative Inquiry, among others.

 

Kanisha Bond is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). Bond earned a PhD in Political Science from Penn State University, an MPP (International Development & Crime Policy) from Georgetown University, and a BA (International Relations & Spanish) from Bucknell University. Bond's work orbits one central research question: How do organization and identity influence dynamics of political challenge in polarized societies? She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine specifically mobilization and institution-building among radical socio-political groups around the world, and particularly in North America, Latin America, and Africa. Her written work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Negotiation, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, and the Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She has contributed book reviews to the American Journal of Sociology and Journal of Conflict Studies, and research-based public commentary to Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Adi Magazine.

She also co-convene the Advancing Research in Conflict (ARC) Consortium Summer Program, which provides methods and ethics training and support to researchers working in violence-affected contexts, and serve on a variety of editorial, review, and advisory boards for organizations that advocate for rigorous and accessible political science in the public interest. 

 

Dorothy Kronick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She studies Latin American political economy, focusing on Venezuela and the politics of crime and policing. Dorothy completed her PhD at Stanford University. Prior to her doctoral studies at Stanford, Dorothy lived in Caracas as a Fulbright Scholar. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Conflict Resolution; her writing on Venezuelan politics has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, The New Republic, and Caracas Chronicles, among other outlets.

 

Nicholas Rush Smith is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, alongside Erica S. Simmons, co-editor of Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His work has also been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, among other outlets.