The Penn Forum on Japan: Critical Race Studies is pleased to announce an upcoming talk by Princeton University PhD Candidate Kimberly Hassel on Thursday, April 29 from 12-1:30PM. Details are as follows. Registration for the event can be found here.

Not Just a Trend: Digital Activism, Black Lives Matter, and Black Japanese Storytelling as Praxis

Thursday, April 29, 12-1:30 PM EST

In the digital age, Social Networking Services (SNS) have increasingly played a role
in highlighting injustice and systemic inequality. This is largely due to the affordances of SNS,
as they facilitate dissemination of information on a wide scale and near-instantaneous rate. This
talk examines the genealogy of major digital activist movements in Japan since March 11 th , 2011,
with a specific focus on the reception of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement among
Japanese users of SNS. I highlight how Black Japanese users utilized SNS, in particular Twitter
and Instagram, to share their deeply personal experiences of anti-Black racism as a way of
educating their followers on the dimensions of anti-Black racism in Japan and the significance of
the global BLM movement. Drawing upon user narratives, media analysis, and vignettes from
my fieldwork in Japan, which coincided with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing global
BLM demonstrations during the summer of 2020, I argue that such storytelling constitutes a
form of antiracist pedagogy and contributes to growing discourse on Black digital networks and
counterpublics. I suggest that the digital should constitute an important site of inquiry for
scholars of Japan, especially as digital activist movements are often co-constitutive and serve as
a milieu for the contesting of longstanding imaginations, systems, and biases within society.

About the Speaker 

Kimberly Hassel (pronouns: she/her/hers) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East
Asian Studies at Princeton University specializing in cultural anthropology, digital ethnography,
and contemporary Japanese society. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship(s) between
Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and the (re)figuring of sociality and
selfhood in contemporary Japan, particularly among youths. Her dissertation fieldwork was
sponsored by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship. Kimberly’s research has
also centered on diaspora studies and critical mixed race studies. Her ongoing project examines
media portrayals of mixed-race identity in Japan vis-à-vis lived experience.
Kimberly holds a BA from Dartmouth College in Japanese modified with Anthropology, and is
an alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and the Institute for
Recruitment of Teachers (IRT).