Event

In the digital age, Social Networking Services (SNS) have increasingly played a role in highlighting injustice and systemic inequality. This is largely due to the affordances of SNS, as they facilitate the dissemination of information on a wide scale and near-instantaneous rate. This talk examines the genealogy of major digital activist movements in Japan since March 11th, 2011, with a specific focus on the reception of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement among Japanese users of SNS. I highlight how Black Japanese users utilized SNS, in particular Twitter and Instagram, to share their deeply personal experiences of anti-Black racism as a way of educating their followers on the dimensions of anti-Black racism in Japan and the significance of the global BLM movement. Drawing upon user narratives, media analysis, and vignettes from my fieldwork in Japan, which coincided with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing global BLM demonstrations during the summer of 2020, I argue that such storytelling constitutes a form of antiracist pedagogy and contributes to growing discourse on Black digital networks and counter publics. I suggest that the digital should constitute an important site of inquiry for scholars of Japan, especially as digital activist movements are often co-constitutive and serve as a milieu for the contesting of longstanding imaginations, systems, and biases within society. Kimberly Hassel (pronouns: she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University specializing in cultural anthropology, digital ethnography, and contemporary Japanese society. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship(s) between Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and the (re)figuring of sociality and selfhood in contemporary Japan, particularly among youths. Her dissertation fieldwork was sponsored by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship. Kimberly’s research has also centered on diaspora studies and critical mixed race studies. Her ongoing project examines media portrayals of mixed-race identity in Japan vis-à-vis lived experience. Kimberly holds a BA from Dartmouth College in Japanese modified with Anthropology and is an alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT).