Toyo University campus
In September 2023, I visited Tokyo and my wonderful colleague Ksenia Golovina at the Department of Global Diversity Studies at Toyo University. The research visit was planned as a follow-up to our jointly organised conference E-MigrAgeing held in Karlstad in blended format in 2022 and our collaborative writing on the topic of migrant homemaking. Both Ksenia and I have been studying the meaning of home and homemaking in migratory contexts for some time and this visit offered a chance to exchange ideas and plan future research.
The urban walk offers a great way to get to know and sense the city. I thank Ksenia for organising several such walks in different ethnic neighbourhoods including China Town, Korea Town, and Little Nepal, as well as locations around the Toyo University campus, the Immigrant Cemetery in Yokohama, and Meiji Shrine to name a few. Connecting it to our research on Russian homemaking in Japan and the UK we looked for and discussed different signs of how diasporic belonging can be present in different urban cityscapes.
Here is a video summary produced by researcher and artist Mariia Ermilova that captures key points of this trip and features a rare moment of me speaking Russian in a professional context when discussing the topic of Russian homemaking – a good example of how we think with and about research.
It was of course a fun and exciting week full of personal reflections on different “global” cities I visited and lived in (New York and London in particular). The trip also made me think about the role of diasporic connections in our professional relations, our many uses of languages in/for research and how our personal and professional identities intertwine in a lot of unexpected ways.
Urban walks in Tokyo
