Andrea Gevurtz Arai w/ Summer Dai, SPACES OF CREATIVE RESISTANCE

About the Book

Cultural anthropologist and UW professor Andrea Gevurtz Arai visits the store to discuss the new book, Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia. PhD student Summer Dai joins in conversation. This volume brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea.

This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others that addresses the last two decades' hollowing out of social connections, socioeconomic income gaps, and general precarity of life in East Asian societies. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

Each chapter is focused on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and environments—both built and natural. These projects all constitute acts of creative resistance to neoliberal development, and each act of creative resistance demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making new worlds and lifeways in the small and everyday. Taking on larger political and economic forces that affect their lives and communities, each project and group of individuals featured here is focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

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

Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist and acting assistant professor in The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She was the interim chair of Korea Studies in 2023-24. Arai is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (Stanford U Press, 2016) and the co-editor of Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Stanford U Press, 2013), and Spaces of Possibility, Korea and Japan: In, Between and Beyond the Nation (UW Press, 2016). She is working on a new collaborative project on low birth societies and eco-feminisms across East Asia, and completing a second ethnographic monograph entitled Changing the Subjects of Gender, Labor and Environment in Trans-Local Japan.

Summer Dai is a third-year PhD student in the Built Environment program at the University of Washington and a contributor to this volume. Her research examines the production and transformation of public space in contemporary Chinese cities. Originally from China, she worked for several years as a content director in the cultural sector before pursuing graduate studies in the United States.

Pre-order your copy of Spaces of Creative Resistance here.

Also check out other Arts events in Seattle, Theatre events in Seattle, Literary Art events in Seattle.