Junki Nakahara

Junki Nakahara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), housed within the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). She earned her PhD in Communication (2023) and MAs in Media, Technology, and Democracy (2022) and Intercultural and International Communication (2019) from American University, and a BEd in Educational Psychology (2017) from the University of Tokyo.

Her research centers on nationalism and (digital) media, discourse theory, and postcolonial and decolonial IR. She is particularly interested in contemporary nationalism entangled with racism, xenophobia, historical revisionism (e.g., denial of wartime atrocities), and misogyny, with a primary focus on East Asia. Her past work draws from critical and cultural studies to examine how communication technologies empower marginalized communities while simultaneously amplifying hegemonic voices and exacerbating inequalities. This includes analyses of the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter as a digitally networked connective action in the comparative contexts of Brazil, India, and Japan (Link), and of how digital nationalism distorts the articulation of feminism on China’s video-sharing platform BiliBili through affordances and policies that implicitly favor nationalist manipulation (Link). Collectively, these studies contribute to her broader inquiry into the dialectical tensions between globalization and nationalization/racialization as key factors shaping the conjunctural dynamics of today’s communication landscape.

At SNAPL, Junki leads the Nationalism & Racism research track, focusing on how nationalism and racism intertwine to create various forms of suppression and intolerance across the Asia-Pacific region, where entanglements among race, ethnicity, nation, and postcoloniality complicate related debates. Through archival data and discourse analysis, her team has developed a typology identifying different logics and manifestations of racism “denial” in state-sanctioned discourses, showing how these are deeply conditioned by dominant ideologies of nationhood—ranging from core social and cultural values to political struggles over national unity and security (Link). Bringing interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretically grounded approaches, the team is currently pursuing projects that include: (1) an investigation into how Asian states appropriate global anti-racist norms through their iterative engagement with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; and (2) a comparative analysis of how different colonial legacies have shaped the articulation of race and racism in India and Korea—from the period of resistance to empire and national liberation to the present.