Universities as Devices for Engaging With Global Political Economies: Tsukuba, Sokendai, Oist, and Tohoku Universities, 1973–2023
Speaker: Sharon Traweek, UCLA
Moderator: Victor Seow, Harvard University
Abstract: In my current work I am examining the changing relationship between learning, research, and society through the prism of the ever-changing, yet long lived apparatus called universities. Embedded in perpetually changing global political economies, universities are locally situated infrastructures for making, evaluating, and disseminating many kinds of knowledge. Universities remain at the nexus of debates about what counts as privileged knowledge, by whom, why, and for whose benefit. They have been seen as crossroads, quagmires, utopias, archives, and caches of resources and entitlement. Sometimes autonomous, universities also have served many different masters and agendas. In this presentation I address how and why ‘internationality’ along with STEM fields have been addressed by Japanese universities over the last 50 years. My focus is on four Japanese government initiatives, including the establishment and development of three universities (Tsukuba in 1973, Sokendai in 1988, and OIST in 2005) plus the “Support for Internationalization of Universities” program, tentatively awarded in 2023 to Tohoku University. I focus on the techniques and technologies of a set of strategic, contested academic practices: funding, administration, governance, assessments, pedagogies, disciplines, curricula, canons, and certifications, such as in physics and astronomy. I ask how these four initiatives are similar to and different from the re-making of universities elsewhere.
About our speaker: Sharon Traweek practices sustained multi-method, multi-sited anthropological and historical research on knowledge making communities at universities and laboratories in Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US. Their work is on ‘making difference at the edge,’ patterns in how new epistemic practices, knowledge making demographics, and global political economies fluctuate together at the edge of metropoles, including in astronomy and physics. Traweek is an associate professor in the UCLA Gender Studies and History Departments , a member of the Faculty Advisory Boards for the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies and the UCLA Streisand Center for the Study of Women, and affiliated with the UCLA Disability Studies Program. Their first book remains in print in English and Chinese: Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard, 1988). Their most recent book, written with Knut H. Sørensen, is Questing Excellence in Academia: A Tale of Two Universities – NTNU and UCLA (Routledge, 2022). The digital version of the book is free; click on the title to access the link. In 2020 they were awarded the Bernal Prize for “distinguished contributions to the field of STS” from the interdisciplinary, international Society for the Social Studies of Science. In July 2024 they will give 5 lectures for the 2024 Netherlands WTMC STS program, based upon chapters in their forthcoming book, Making Difference at the Edge: New Ways of Knowing Together. Traweek has been a faculty member at MIT, Rice, and UCLA in departments of anthropology, gender studies, history, and science, technology, and society; they have held visiting appointments at Tsukuba, Sokendai, OIST, and Lund University, among others. Their work has been funded by the Japanese and US governments, various private foundations in Japan, Sweden, and the US, plus several universities. They have given presentations about their work in 19 countries. Their new website is under development; some of their publications are posted at researchgate.net and academia.edu.
You can register for the talk here.