Spaces of Creative Resistance – Social Change Projects in Twenty–First–Century East Asia

Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others for a collection that addresses the last two decades' hollowing out of social connections, socioeconomic income gaps, and general precarity of life in East Asian societies. Written by authors from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, each chapter is focused on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and environments—both built and natural. These projects all constitute acts of creative resistance to neoliberal development, and each act of creative resistance demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making new worlds and lifeways in the small and everyday. Taking on larger political and economic forces that affect their lives and communities, each project and group of individuals featured here is focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

ANDREA GEVURTZ ARAI is a cultural anthropologist and acting assistant professor in The Henry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan and the coeditor of Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times and Spaces of Possibility: In, Between, and Beyond Korea and Japan.

CHRISTOPHER T. NELSON is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Okinawa and the forthcoming When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Okinawa.