Abstract
The author revisits her field experience of living in a multiethnic neighborhood in urban Japan, where people of different historical, socio-cultural, and political backgrounds reside, taking an autoethnographic approach. The neighborhood was becoming multiethnic with an arrival of new immigrants at the time of her fieldwork. The purpose of this exploration is to re-examine her interaction with her research participants and research findings, and to add another layer of analysis to understand the role of interpretation and her role as a “native” anthropologist doing research “at home.” Through this examination, she clarifies many shades of “insider” and “outsider” status and how they depend on particular relationships in particular situations. She also shows how her positionality of being an “insider” led to a specific kind of “positioned” knowledge and “partial” perspectives in her interpretation of school and community. At the end, she discusses what role interpretation played in this study and why her analysis produced a critical assessment of educational programs in the field site.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my field site, which I call Miyako Elementary School and Miyako neighborhood, and the participants in my research who generously shared their experiences with me during my field research. I also like to express my great appreciation to Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and Neriko Doerr for commenting on the earlier versions of this chapter. The field research for this study was assisted by the Annual Fellowship of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1998–1999); Japan Science Society (1999–2000); Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (2008); and a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program (2009–2011) administered by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in cooperation with and with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
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Okubo, Y. (2015). 3.4 Negotiating the Boundaries Within: An Anthropologist at Home in a Multiethnic Neighborhood in Urban Japan. In: Smeyers, P., Bridges, D., Burbules, N., Griffiths, M. (eds) International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_27
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