Events

Time: Friday, December 20, 2024, from 3:30PM to 18:30PM (JST)
Part1 15：30～17：00（In person+online）　Part2 17：00～18：30（In-person only）
Venue: Seminar Room, Engineering Science International Hall, Toyonaka Campus, Osaka University
Languages: Presentation will be in English. Discussion will be in both English and Japanese.

Registration: Please register from the URL or QR code on the flyer. The registration period for this event has ended.

【Presentation】
Matias Ariel Chiappe Ippolito（Professor, El Colegio de Mexico, Center for Asian and African Studies）

【Abstract】
As Japanese Studies becomes a global field, reflections on commonly shared issues across different regions and the specific methodological perspectives and research agendas rooted in particular academic environments can bring new opportunities for research and education. Hoping to open such opportunities, we welcome researchers and graduate students from El Colegio de México, one of the leading international centers for Asian and Japanese Studies in Latin America. In the first part, Professor Matías Ariel Chiappe Ippolito will propose critical reconfigurations of concepts of “positionality” and “reception” as a strategy for defining new epistemological and methodological perspectives in the research of Japanese Literature at the intersection of Japan and Latin America. In the second part, graduate students from El Colegio de México will present their research projects, offering a valuable opportunity for intellectual exchange with students and researchers at Osaka University.

【Program】
15:30-17:00
Part 1（In person+online）
How My Reception of Japanese Literature Became a Wider Study of Japan and Latin America
Matias Ariel Chiappe Ippolito (Professor, El Colegio de Mexico, Center for Asian and African Studies )

Contrary to the common statement (or prohibition) that claims that “no first-person narratives” is the way to go in academia, we constantly research and write about objects of study that interest us on a personal level. Marjorie Stewart explained that personal experience can serve as frame, context, example, and even discovery of a given research (“Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writings,” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing 3, Parlor Press, 2020). The uses of personal experience in academia are not limited, however, to those rhetoric mechanisms (how information is presented after the research stage), but also as the basis of the methodology (how information is gathered or understood while researching). By reconstructing the history of how I came to study Japanese literature and by building up on the concept of “positionality”, the recognition of the factors that influence our research practice, and that of “reception”, the process by which audiences engage with cultural production from diverse contexts, I will explain how tracing our interests as researchers (or as ‘receptors in a given position’) is a research methodology in itself that simultaneously preserves subjectivity and postulates a concrete object of study. My aim is not to praise autoethnography or self-reflection when analyzing a given phenomenon, but to understand personal experience as a sample of a wider audience of which all researchers are participants. Hence, the talk will call attention to the importance of reflecting upon the background of our research motivations, the broader dimension of our interests on a certain topic, and the possibility for said interests to become examples of intercultural connections. Last but not least, I will invite participants to think of personal experience as a weapon against the mechanization of academic writing; specifically, via AI. Nowadays it seems hard to find something on which to research and write that a machine couldn’t have presented better. On this level, too, personal experience functions as a unique tool that can help dismantle the automatization of academia.

17:00-18:30
Part 2（In-person only）Graduate Workshop