Faculty

TORIYAMA, Junko

Specialization/Discipline

Gender Studies, Gender Studies on the Middle East, Cultural Anthropology

Research Topic

I have been conducting researches on ways how people live their lives from the everyday-life perspectives in the Middle East. I deploy Gender Studies that problematizes the inequality and people’s suffering through the lens of gender, and Cultural Anthropology that attempts to comprehensively conceptualize human beings. My previous research topics include work life balance for women, implications of pursuing career for women, and sex and procreation for women, as well as the various school systems and their relations to the social structure in the Middle East.

Anthropology by looking into “foreign” cultures and societies enables us to see that the common sense only works within the very small circle of communities. Gender Studies encourages us to seek the source of joys and sufferings within social structures. Both perspectives promote conceptualizing the world orders in a relative sense, and suggest the possibility of alternatives. They cater the powerful tools for social critiques that allow us to face, to tackle, and many times even to laugh at sufferings for envisioning a better world.