FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.
The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.
Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.
Teaching Human Rights : Embedding Human Rights Practice in Education
Susan Roberta Katz and Shabnam Koirala-Azad teach International and Multicultural Education at USF, and are on the founding faculty for the School of Education's doctorate with an emphasis in human rights education.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
The Shah and Ayatollahs: Continuities and Ruptures
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.
Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.
Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.
CISAC Conference Room
Abbas Milani
615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.
Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.
Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.
An Introduction to Ukraine
This unit provides a broad introduction to Ukrainian history with activities that touch upon Ukrainian culture. Photos, maps, and images accompany the unit as well as a variety of class, group, and individual activities.
Legacies of the Vietnam War
Nuclear Tipping Point: A Teacher's Guide
War Games: Childhood, Militarization, and the Future of a Pacifist Japan
RSVP'S NO LONGER BEING ACCEPTED,
VENUE HAS REACHED CAPACITY
Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series
In March 2000, the release of Sony's new PlayStation2 hit a snag. The Japanese government classified the game console as a "general purpose product related to conventional weapons" on the grounds that it was powerful enough to be used as an actual missile guidance system. Accordingly, the government applied export controls on PlayStation2 requiring that distributors obtain a special license. Illustrating the coinage of such terms as "military-industrial-entertainment complex," the incident marked one of numerous collusions between military and commercial uses of video games in Japan and elsewhere.
It is against this backdrop that Frühstück traces the rules and conventions of war games from the fields of rural Japan in the nineteenth century to cyberspace in the twenty-first century. Her examination of the varying configurations of militarism and infantilism, the production of "child soldiers," and the competing roles of state agencies and entertainment industries suggest that war has been leaving its mark on the social body, and on children in particular, not only in the form of injury or death. Rather, through military institutions, pedagogy, technology, popular culture, and other intermediaries, war continues to have general effects on Japanese society and the global order as a whole.
Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Employing historical and sociocultural methodologies, Frühstück's research focuses on militarization and war, gender and sexuality, and Japan in a global context from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Her book Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) was translated into Japanese as Fuan na heishitachi: Nippon Jieitai Kenkyû (2008). She is also the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908-1941 (1997), and co-editor of the volumes The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität in Zentraleuropa und Ostasien (1999), and Recreating Japanese Men (in press, 2011). Committed to engaging the humanities and the social sciences, she has written essays in English, Japanese and German that have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, American Ethnologist, Jinbun Gakuho, and Zeitschrift für angewandte Sozialforschung, among other scholarly journals.
Since joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Frühstück has been serving as the executive board director of the UC-wide Pacific Rim Research Program and as a member of the editorial boards of the University of California Press and the Journal of Japanese Studies. She also has been a member of the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, the executive board of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan, and the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies. At UCSB, she has dry appointments with the departments of history, anthropology, and feminist studies, and the Cold War Center.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Single-mothers in Japan: Living Arrangements and Well-Being
Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series
The prevalence of single-mother families in Japan has increased markedly as a result of rising divorce rates. Unlike in the U.S, where the well-being of single mothers and their children is a central research and policy focus, we know very little about single-mother families in Japan. The most widely-discussed characteristic of these families is their economic deprivation. Over half of Japanese single mothers live in poverty despite the fact that nearly all are employed. In the context of limited public income transfers and low earnings, intergenerational coresidence is a potentially important source of support that may buffer the impact of single-parenthood for the nearly one-in-three single mothers who live with their parents.
In this talk, Professor Raymo will present results from the first two studies to examine the role of living arrangements in moderating relationships between single parenthood and well-being in Japan. In the first study, he uses data from a survey of single mothers to examine differences in the self-rated health and subjective economic well-being of those living with parents and those living alone. In the second study, he uses data from two rounds of a nationally-representative survey to compare time spent with children in single-mother families and two-parent families, paying attention to the ways in which the presence of coresident grandparents may moderate relationships between family structure and parent-child interactions. In both studies, I find that single mothers living alone are characterized by relatively poor outcomes, net of theoretically relevant controls. In the second study, he also finds that single mothers living with parents are no different than their married counterparts in terms of the time spent playing with, instructing, and eating dinner with children. He discusses the potential implications of these findings for inequality and the reproduction of disadvantage in Japan.
Jim Raymo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is also an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and the Center for East Asian Studies. Raymo's research focuses primarily on evaluating patterns and potential consequences of demographic changes associated with rapid population aging in Japan. He has published widely on key features of recent family change in Japan, including delayed marriage, extended coresidence with parents, and increases in premarital cohabitation, shotgun marriages, and divorce. In two other lines of research, he has examined relationships between work, family characteristics, and health outcomes at older ages in Japan and patterns of retirement and well-being at older ages in the U.S. He is currently involved in the early stages of a project that will examine family change and inequality in Japan in cross-national comparative perspective. His research has been published in top U.S. journals such as American Sociological Review, Demography, and Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences as well as in Japanese journals.
Raymo teaches classes on Family and Household Demography, Demographic Techniques, and Research Methods. He is currently the Associate Director of Training at the Center for Demography and Ecology and the faculty director of the Sociology Department's Concentration in Analysis and Research. He also serves on the editorial boards of Demography and Journal of Marriage and Family. Raymo received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan after completing his M.A. in Economics at Osaka City University in Japan.
Department of Sociology
Main Quad, Building 120
Mendenhall, Room 101