Saturday University: Spaces of Creative Resistance

Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season.

Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in 21st-Century East Asia
Andrea Gevurtz Arai

This lecture will explore and expand on the newly published Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in 21st-Century East Asia volume. Over the last two decades social disconnection, increased income disparity, and new burdens have been placed on the young, women’s reproductive labor, and the environment in Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Bringing together a cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others, each chapter in the volume focuses on a different form of “creative resistance" in response to these issues.

Each chapter also demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday—focused on making more a liveable present and more possible future. The chapters focus on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and built and natural environments.

The volume was supported by the University of Washington's Title VI East Asia Center, the Center for Japan Studies, Center for Korea Studies, Taiwan Studies Program, China Studies and the Office for Global Affairs (through a 2021-22 “Global Initiative Grant”). The volume also includes a teaching appendix.

Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist of Japan and East Asia and Acting Assistant Professor in The Henry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Arai was the interim chair of Korean Studies 2023-24. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (2016), "Nuclear Visuality and Popular Resistance in Hitomi Kamanaka’s Documentary Films” in R. DiNitto (editor), Eco-Disaster Films in Japan (Nov. 2024) and editor of Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Project in East Asia (June, 2025). Arai co-edited: Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan (“When is a Prison Like a Folk Art Museum: Movement, Affect and the After Colonial in Seoul and Tokyo” ) and Global Futures in East Asia.

Arai is completing a second ethnographic monograph: Changing the Subjects: Gendered Labor and Environment After 3.11 in Trans-Local Japan.