The concept of "Japan's Black Studies" is not at all an oddity. Much like various Black intellectual and disciplinary formations forged in the struggle for liberation across the African diaspora, Black studies in Japan possesses a dynamism of its own. My presentation will introduce this curious history, including seemingly idiosyncratic ways in which Japanese scholars of Black studies and ordinary people connected to the Black intellectual tradition contributed to critical knowledge and engaged in the practice of transpacific antiracism throughout the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.

The 1860 Japanese Embassy was the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States and arrived at a time rife with racial tensions. Within the African American press, stories of the Japanese embassy inspired hope for the future and a sense of brotherhood with the samurai visitors. Amidst the confusion and racial controversy sparked by the embassy’s visit, African American and abolitionist newspapers embraced the 1860 embassy as “Negroes from Japan” and used race to create an imagined solidarity that subverted state hierarchies of “civilization” and race.

Abstract

Japan has an unusual and complicated history of engaging with concepts of race. In the past, many Japanese people asserted the concept of
Japanese racial superiority and justified colonialism by positioning indigenous people as racially inferior. In Western society, Japanese
people have historically been targets of racism, and racist ideologies within Japan persist today and, in many ways, have been made invisible.
In this lecture, I would like to discuss the discrimination experienced by Ainu women in marriage, and consider the racial symbols of “red,” “

Most analyses of multidimensional poverty use cross-sectional data. Consequently very little is known about multidimensional poverty dynamics at the micro-level. This paper uses panel data of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for 19 countries over 2016–2020 to analyse a multidimensional poverty index broadly consistent with previous work using the same data. Technically, I build on previous research proposing analyses of transitions in multidimensional poverty and its deprivations to illuminate processes which result in deprivations to accumulate.

As the topic of job quality is garnering more attention in both the academic and policy making literature, calls for standardised measures of the concept are gaining increasing traction. However, prevailing measures based on dashboards of complex lists of indicators are difficult to interpret, especially across countries. More recently, the World Bank has published a working paper on “Global Job Quality” that measures multidimensional deprivations across 40 developing countries and is based on a methodology developed by Sehnbruch et al. (2020) and the Alkire/Foster method (2011).

This series of three public lectures is entitled ‘Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role.

Professor Thomas Hurka is currently Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto. He gained a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy at University of Oxford University, after a B.A. at the University of Toronto.

This series of three public lectures is entitled ‘Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role.

Professor Thomas Hurka is currently Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto. He gained a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy at University of Oxford University, after a B.A. at the University of Toronto.

This series of three public lectures is entitled 'Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role.

Professor Thomas Hurka is currently Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto. He gained a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy at University of Oxford University, after a B.A. at the University of Toronto.

Cases such as Cambridge Analytica or the use of AI by the Chinese government suggest that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) creates some risks for democracy. This paper analyzes these risks by using the concept of epistemic agency and argues that the use of AI risks to influence the formation and the revision of beliefs in at least three ways: the direct, intended manipulation of beliefs, the type of knowledge offered, and the creation and maintenance of epistemic bubbles. It then suggests some implications for research and policy.