Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | 5:00PM - 6:30PM (PT) | RSVP

EASC Guest Speaker Series: Gabriele Koch and Benjamin Uchiyama

Gabriele Koch is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Gabriele is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the social meanings and consequences of care in contemporary Japan. Her first book, Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy (Stanford University Press, 2020), explores the relationship between how adult Japanese women working in Tokyo’s sex industry think about what sex is and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. The book examines how Japanese sex workers regard their services as a form of socially necessary care and highlights the gendered interdependencies and inequalities that shape women’s work in the Japanese economy more generally. Currently, Asst Prof Koch is working on two subsequent projects. Her second project focuses on new therapeutic uses of forests and changing human-forest relations to explore the recent Japanese re-imagination of abandoned forests as agents of human well-being. The third project, funded by The Japan Foundation, investigates debates about care as a human rights issue in relation to welfare for disabled, sick, and aging populations.