Who will rule? The significance of South Africa’s upcoming election

Adriaan Basson is editor-in-chief of News24 and the author of four books on corruption and current affairs. He is the recipient of multiple awards for investigative journalism, including the CNN African Journalist of the Year for news and the Taco Kuiper award. Basson worked as an investigative journalist on the Mail & Guardian, where he was a founding member of amaBhungane, before moving to City Press as assistant editor. In 2013, he became editor of Beeld and in 2016 was appointed editor-in-chief of News24.

Press under pressure: Argentina’s multi-faceted journalism crises

Hugo Alconada Mon is an Argentinian journalist specialised in Investigative Journalism about corruption in politics, money laundering and corporate fraud. He’s been woking for more than 20 years in La Nación, one of Argentina media outlet leaders, and he is part of the newspapers’ main editor team since 2009. Currently, he also writes for the Spanish journal El País. He is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and worked on the Panama Papers.

Book Launch – Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World

'Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World' is the result of the Meiji Restoration sesquicentennial conference held at St Antony’s College in 2019. It rethinks the way in which ‘the Opening of Japan’ constitutes a historical event that connected the archipelago to the wider world.

Valedictory Lecture – A ‘Class’-Less Society Japan? How is Inequality Interpreted Without the Concept of Class?

I was puzzled why Japanese sociologists who study social mobility or social inequality don't use the concept of "class" or kaikyu(階級)in Japanese, while using the term when writing in English. In Japanese, instead, they use kaisho (階層), whose literal translation in English is “strata.”

Great Power Politics and Japan’s Immigration Dilemma

The coronavirus pandemic suddenly closed Japan’s doors to inbound tourism and migration in early 2020s. But those doors were never going to be closed indefinitely. The pandemic, originating in Wuhan, revealed the centrality of China in particular to Japan’s immigration dilemma. China’s transformation in the twenty-first century into an economic superpower has been an understudied possible motivation for Japan’s government to liberalise the country’s immigration regime as a tool for retaining influence in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

Making of the “Feebleminded”: Gender and Family for the Medical Discourse Around Eugenic Sterilization in 1950s Japan

This lecture examines the medical discourse of the ‘feebleminded’, which emerged in 1950s Japan in the process of implementing involuntary sterilization under the Eugenic Protection Law (1948-96). It shows how the medical discourse was gendered and caricatured their sexuality as a threat to social order. It then argues that the making of the medical knowledge about the ‘feebleminded’, though appearing as scientific, was a social act, by describing how the patient’s families were involved in the making of the knowledge.

New Life From the Ruins of Japanese Death Rites

Deep in the Fukuyama mountains, “the grave of the graves” houses acres of unwanted headstones. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and butsudan. But in social atomised twenty-first Japan, this intergenerational system of care, along with the household and nation that once sustained it, is collapsing. This talk describes the practical and affective burdens imposed by the ruins of vanishing death rites and explores how new life (which is to say new death) may emerge.
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