The Visual Anthropology of Japan: In and Outside the Classroom, Revisited

JAWS / AJJ Joint Conference 2025
Session 14 - Reflecting and Revisiting「Teaching Japan」
University of Hyogo - Kobe Campus for Commerce
Building 5
April 5, 2025, 15:40 - 17:10

Campus access: https://www.u-hyogo.ac.jp/english/access/#id01

Campus map: https://www.u-hyogo.ac.jp/about/access/kobeshoka/

Paper 4: The Visual Anthropology of Japan: In and Outside the Classroom, Revisited
Steven C. Fedorowicz, Professor, Kansai Gaidai University

Abstract: My chapter describes teaching a class comprised of international exchange students from many different countries alongside local students preparing for their study-abroad programs called “Visual Anthropology of Japan” at a Japanese university from 2006 to 2014. Topically, the course was about the presentation and representation of culture through film, photography, and other visual communication arts within the shifting anthropological ecologies of media, methods, and theory. Teaching “Japan” in this context required several balances of instruction and guidance for students of different academic levels, backgrounds, language skills and expectations studying together in the same class. Because of my training and background in cultural anthropology and visual anthropology, I do not consider my text as a theoretical treatise on pedagogy per se. Rather it is closer to an ethnographic—sometimes autoethnographic—account based on the fieldwork of teaching this course under certain conditions at a global educational setting. In my presentation, I will revisit this setting through the reflexive lens of ba (Kajimaru, Coker and Kazuma 2021), specifically, the convergence of players, place and performance during the period of the multimodal turn in visual anthropology that coincided with the class. This reminiscent revisit reaffirms the potential and possibility for a more active student learning environment and further course development to make a new and improved version of the course.

For more details about the conference and panel: https://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/2025/02/announcement-jawsajj-joint-conference.html