Refracting global imaginations through collaborative autoethnography and teaching: Reflections from two “border crossing”/“returnee” academics in Japan

Abstract

This chapter explores borders and border-crossings in the ethnographic teaching-and-learning experience in a multicultural classroom at University A. From 2015 to 2016, we facilitated and conducted fieldwork in Shin-Okubo, one of Tokyo's symbolic sites of multiculturalism. The goal of the project was for undergraduate students who are from diverse cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary backgrounds to create a ‘team ethnography’ that aims to bring together a constellation of perspectives and landscapes of a fast-changing town. This complicates the meanings and experiences of multiculturalism and borders. The stories of our teaching practice are also woven into our ‘in-between’ identities—as Japanese female scholars and educators trained in academic institutions in the U.S. and the U.K., then ‘returning’ to Japan. We reflect on how our perspectives changed through time from introspective questioning of academic identity to more active engagement in ‘unsettling’ social identities/borders. Through collaborative autoethnographic writing as well as analysis of students' field notes, we reflect on our experiences and positionalities as facilitators of this project in relation to individual students, to the university as an institution and to the field of Shin-Okubo. We explore the ways in which the students and we reimagined concepts such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘Japaneseness' through conducting team ethnography in a multicultural fieldsite. We suggest that teaching and learning team-ethnography may cultivate more embodied awareness of our positions within the sometimes conflating, sometimes disjunctured discourses of globalization within Japanese higher education.