Gender
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Banner image of APARC May 24 Webinar, center text "How Can Women 'Shine' Brighter in Japan? Gains and Obstacles in Women's Advancement in Japanese Society", with photo of a Japanese woman thinking to the right

May 24, 5:00 p.m - 6:30 p.m. PT / May 25, 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. JT

The advancement of women in the workplace has been an elusive goal in Japan for decades. The shrinking and aging population call for a change in gender expectations that would enable Japan to tap women’s talents for economic growth, but many hurdles continue to block progress in gender equity in the workplace and at home. In this session, two experts who have led the efforts to increase women in leadership positions discuss the accomplishments and future challenges in enhancing gender diversity and inclusion in Japanese organizations. 


Panelists

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Square photo portrait of Mika Nabeshima
Mika Nabeshima has held several global assignments since joining Tokio Marine headquarters in 1991,
She established her career in claims, working with clients to resolve liability and property claims, provide risk management solutions, manage litigation, and fight fraudulent claims.
After seven years at Tokio Marine America, she became general manager of human resources at TMHD in 2019 and then added the role of Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, becoming the company’s first female C-suite officer, in April 2021.

Mika is responsible for Tokio Marine’s global HR strategy, from talent management and development to diversity & inclusion initiatives, governance of group companies, and ensuring the safety of expats around the world.
She graduated from Davidson College (North Carolina) with a B.A. in Political Science in 1991. 

 

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Square photo portrait of Naomi Koshi
Naomi Koshi is a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and former mayor of Otsu City. From 2002 to 2011, Naomi practiced corporate law at Nishimura & Asahi in Tokyo and Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. From 2010 to 2011, Naomi was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia Business School.  In 2012, Naomi was elected mayor of Otsu City and served a total of eight years. As the youngest female mayor, Naomi successfully expanded Otsu's childcare system, thus making it easier for many Japanese women to return to the workforce. Naomi is admitted to practice law in Japan, New York, and California and is now a partner at Miura & Partners. In 2021, Naomi Co-Founded OnBoard K.K., a company specializing in diversifying Japanese corporate boards. Naomi also serves as an outside director of V-Cube, Inc and SoftBank Corp. She holds multiple degrees from Hokkaido University and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.


Moderator

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Square photo portrait of Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is also Director of the Japan Program. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, 2021). 

 

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Square image with Webinar title "How Can Women “Shine” Brighter in Japan?: Gains and Obstacles in Women’s Advancement in Japanese Society", with a photo of a Japanese Woman thinking
This event is part of the 2022 Spring webinar seriesNegotiating Women's Rights and Gender Equality in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Kiyoteru Tsutsui

via Zoom Webinar

Naomi Koshi Partner, Miura & Partners, CEO, OnBoard K.K., Former Mayor of Otsu City
Mika Nabeshima Executive Office and General Manager of Human Resources Dept., Tokio Marine Holdings
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Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China's Divorce Courts event image

Using 'big data' computational techniques to scrutinize cases covering 2009–2016 from all 252 basic-level courts in two Chinese provinces, Henan and Zhejiang, Ethan Michelson reveals that women have borne the brunt of a dramatic intensification since the mid-2000s of a decades-long practice of denying divorce requests. This talk discusses key findings from his new book of the same name. Michelson's analysis of almost 150,000 divorce trials reveals routine and egregious violations of China's own laws upholding the freedom of divorce, gender equality, and the protection of women's physical security. Michelson takes the reader upstream to the institutional sources of China's clampdown on divorce and downstream to its devastating and highly gendered human toll, showing how judges in an overburdened court system clear their oppressive dockets at the expense of women's lawful rights and interests.


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Portrait of Ethan Michelson
Ethan Michelson is the James and Noriko Gines Department Chair in East Asian Languages and Cultures as well as Professor of Sociology and Law at Indiana University Bloomington, where he has been teaching courses on law and society, law and authoritarianism, and contemporary Chinese society since 2003. He has won several awards for his published research on China’s legal system.

Via Zoom

Ethan Michelson Professor of Sociology and Law, Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
Seminars
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This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Gender politics were a front and center issue in South Korea's March 9th presidential election. What does the outsized role that anti-feminism played in electoral politics and public discourse convey about the politics of gender in Korea today? This panel will examine contemporary public perception and institutional tolerance of gender equality in South Korea and provide a historical overview of women's numerical and substantive political representation since women's suffrage in 1948. The panelists will also draw on their experiences conducting multi-country studies to provide comparative regional insight.

Speakers:

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Young-Im Lee

Young-Im Lee is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches gender politics and East Asian politics. Her research primarily focuses on gender and elections in South Korea and Taiwan. Dr. Lee is a chief researcher at the Institute of Political Studies at Sogang University in Seoul and was a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Her research has been supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan, and the American Political Science Association. Dr. Lee is currently working on a book project analyzing the election and impeachment of South Korea's first female president Park Geun-hye. Her research appeared in Electoral Studies, Politics & Gender, Feminist Media Studies, and Washington Post, among other outlets.

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portrait of Min Hee Go

Min Hee Go is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ewha Woman's University in Korea. Prior to joining Ewha, Dr. Go earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2012 and taught as assistant professor at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. Her research interests broadly concern key issues in diversity and sustainability, including gender and racial inequalities and sustainable development. Her first book, Rethinking Community Resilience: The Politics of Disaster Recovery in New Orleans (2021, NYU Press), investigates how civic capacity may compromise, rather than facilitate, the process of building resilience after crisis. She is currently working on her second book project which examines gender equality in East Asia. Focusing on three democratic countries—Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan— she investigates why Asian countries show different levels of public perception and institutional tolerance on gender equality. 

Moderator: Kelsi Caywood, Research Associate in Korea Program at APARC, Stanford University

Kelsi Caywood
Young-Im Lee <I>Assistant Professor of Political Science</I>, California State University, Sacramento
Min Hee Go <I>Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations</I>, Ewha Woman's University, Korea
Panel Discussions
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This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's spring 2022 webinar series, Negotiating Women's Rights and Gender Equality in Asia.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Since 2013, women's higher education enrollment rate has outpaced men's enrollment rate in South Korea. Despite this increase in educational attainment, gender inequalities remain deeply rooted in Korean higher education, including gender gaps in STEM, doctoral program enrollment, and faculty diversity. Universities have also fallen short in including gender-related topics in curricular content and ensuring safe campuses for women. The panel will reflect on these educational disparities and the social, cultural, and economic forces shaping Korean women's lives during and after higher education. It will also place Korea's experience in a comparative context by discussing global trends in gender and higher education.

Speakers:

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portrait of Namhee Kim

Namhee Kim has a 20-year research and teaching career in higher education in South Korea and the U.S. She is currently an Associate Professor of Education at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. She has previously worked for Korean Education Development Institute and Korean Women’s Development Institute in the areas of education policy development and conducting research on women workforce issues. Her earlier teaching career includes many graduate classes at Texas A & M and Northcentral University in the US. Kim holds a PhD in Education majoring in Adult Education and Human Resource Development from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and MEd and BA from Ewha Womans University. Her research interests include women’s career development, critical human resource development, and international education.  

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portrait of Christine Min Wotipka

Christine Min Wotipka is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Her research centers around two main themes examined from cross-national and longitudinal approaches. One line of work seeks to understand how marginalized groups and topics have been incorporated into school textbooks. Another contributes to the comparative scholarship in gender, diversity, leadership, and higher education. Her articles have appeared in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Gender & Society, American Journal of Education, AERA Open, Journal of LGBT Youth, Comparative Education Review, Compare, Comparative Education, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Wotipka earned her BA in International Relations and French at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and MA in Sociology and PhD in International Comparative Education at Stanford University. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she proudly served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in rural northeast Thailand and worked in South Korea at an economic research firm. Among her professional activities, Dr. Wotipka has consulted on girls education policies for the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan.

Moderator: Dafna Zur, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures; director of Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University

Via Zoom. Register at https://bit.ly/3wb31nW.

Panel Discussions
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an image of a map of the world with a U.S. and China flag with the event text details.

 

How can we understand the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China without fueling anti-Asian hate?

Join REDI's student representatives, Maddy Morlino and Miku Yamada, for an open discussion on how we can avoid contributing to racial discrimination when engaging in academic dialogues on U.S.-China competition.

This in-person event will facilitate an open dialogue with participants and invited speakers, FSI Senior Fellow Thomas Fingar and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dongxian Jiang. Since seating is limited, registration is reserved for current Stanford faculty, students, and staff only with a Stanford.edu email.

Confirmed attendees will be notified by email on February 22.

Speaker bios:

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009. From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Dongxian Jiang is a political theorist and intellectual historian. His primary research interests lie in comparative political theory, the history of political thought, and pressing practical questions of democratic and international politics, including Western and non-Western perspectives on human rights, democracy, good governance, and political legitimacy. He is also interested in the transmission and traveling of political ideas across divergent intellectual traditions. He holds a B.A. in International Politics and Philosophy from Peking University, an M.A. in Political Science from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University (as of September 2020). Dongxian Jiang is currently Civics Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, Stanford University.

Registration required:

REGISTER

 

Thomas Fingar FSI Senior Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Dongxian Jiang Political Science Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

This event will offer simultaneous translation between Japanese and English. 
当イベントは日本語と英語の同時通訳がついています。

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
当イベントはZoomウェビナーで行われます。ウェビナーに参加するためには、
こちらのリンクをクリックし、事前登録をして下さい。


Febuary 14, 4-5:30 p.m. California time/ February 15, 9-10:30 a.m. Japan time

This event is part of the 2022 Japan Program Winter webinar series, The Future of Social Tech: U.S.-Japan Partnership in Advancing Technology and Innovation with Social Impact

 

COVID-19 has changed the way we work. While remote work has become the norm, the pandemic has also highlighted the inequity in childcare, elderly care, and household work. Japanese workplaces feel a particularly acute need for adjustment, as lack of digitalization and persistent gender inequality continue to limit productivity gains and diversity in the workforce. Social entrepreneurs in Japan have started offering new technologies that address these problems and transform Japanese work environments, using matching algorithms, innovative apps, and other new technologies. How can these social technologies reshape the workplace? What principles do we need in using these technologies in practice, in order to unlock the keys to untapped human resource potentials and realize a more equitable and inclusive work environment in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere?  Fuhito Kojima, a renowned economist specializing in matching theory, will talk about market design from the perspective of regulation design and economics, and Eiko Nakazawa, an influential entrepreneur, will speak about her experiences founding education and childcare startups in the United States and Japan, moderated by Yasumasa Yamamoto, a leading expert on technology and business in Japan and the United States. 

 

Panelists

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Photo of Fuhito Kojima
Fuhito Kojima is a Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo and Director of the University of Tokyo Market Design Center. He received a B.A. at University of Tokyo (2003) and PhD at Harvard (2008), both in economics and taught at Yale (2008-2009, as postdoc) and then Stanford (2009-2020, as professor) while spending one year at Columbia in his sabbatical year. His research involves game theory, with a particular focus on “market design,” a field where game-theoretic analysis is applied to study the design of various mechanisms and institutions. His recent works include matching mechanism designs with complex constraints, and he is working on improving medical residency match and daycare seat allocation in Japan based on his academic work. Outside of academia, he serves as an advisor for Keizai Doyu Kai as well as several private companies.

 

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Photo of Eiko Nakazawa
Eiko Nakazawa is the Founder and CEO of Dearest, Inc., a VC-Backed startup in the United States that makes high-quality learning, childcare, and parenting support accessible by helping employers subsidize those costs for their working families. She also advises and invests in early-stage startups, and has recently co-founded Ikura, Inc., an education x fintech company in Japan. Prior to founding Dearest, Nakazawa spent 11 years with Sony Corporation, where she led global marketing, turnaround, and new business launch initiatives. Nakazawa earned an M.S. in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

 

 

Moderator

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Photo of Yasumasa Yamamoto
Yasumasa Yamamoto is a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University graduate school of management and has been a specialist in emerging technology such as fintech, blockchain, and deep learning. He was previously industry analyst at Google, senior specialist in quantitative analysis of secularized products, as well as derivatives at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in New York. Yamamoto holds a M.S. from Harvard University and a masters degree from University of Tokyo.





 

Via Zoom Webinar
Register:  https://bit.ly/3odkWFT 

 

 

Fuhito Kojima <br>Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo<br><br>
Eiko Nakazawa <br>Founder and CEO, Dearest Inc.<br><br>
Yasumasa Yamamoto <br>Visiting Professor at Kyoto University
Panel Discussions
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The REDI Task Force invites you to the next event in our Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs series; an exploration of the life of enslaved women. This panel discussion will feature experts of enslavement across the Atlantic including the U.S., Brazil, West Africa, and the West Indies.

What do we really understand about the lives and legacies of African enslaved women across the Atlantic? Enslavement is often rendered through a genderless lens, one in which the category of "race" trumps all else. However, research tells a very different story and one that requires an intimate analysis - enslaved women across the Atlantic held an experience that was shaped uniquely by their race and gender. This conversation will explore how Black women during the slave period acted and reacted to the material forces that shaped their lives in an attempt to not only survive the harsh conditions but to carve out a future for ancestors. This interdisciplinary discussion will draw from various archival sources ranging from Senegambia to Brasil's sugar plantations to articulating novel understandings of enslaved women's selfhood. 

The panel will feature perspectives from three historians to uncover the intimate lives of African women; their kinship, religious, and resistance practices. Tracing a path through different locales, from free to enslaved status, we will discuss not only the lives of enslaved women, but their legacies.

This event is free and open to the public. There will be time for a Q&A.

Note: This discussion will be recorded. 

Speaker bios:

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies whose teaching and research explores the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the United States. A historian of African-American religion, she specializes in the religiosity of enslaved people in the South, religion in the African Atlantic, and women’s religious histories.  Her first book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC 2021) offers a gendered history of enslaved people’s religiosity from the colonial period to the onset of the Civil War. She is currently at work on her second project, which traces the gendered, racialized history of phenomena termed “witchcraft” in the United States. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Forum for Theological Education, among others. She received her B.A. in English from Spelman College, and Master of Divinity and Ph.D. from Emory University.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020), a winner of numerous awards including the 2021 Wesley-Logan Best Book in African Diaspora History Prize from the Association of American Historians and the 2021 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities (2nd edition), Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections. She is the Founding Curator of #ADPhDProjects which brings social justice and histories of slavery together. She is also Co-Kin Curator at Taller Electric Marronage.  She is also a Digital Alchemist at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence and a co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group with Dr. Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky). Her past collaborations include organizing with the LatiNegrxs Project. As a historian and Black Studies scholar, Johnson researches black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation. As a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent.

Nohora Arrieta Fernández is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University in 2021. Her current research focuses on art history, visual studies, the history of commodities, and the intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in the Americas. She has published essays and articles on Latin American literature and visual arts, comics, and the Afro-Latin American Diaspora, and is a collaborator of art magazines as Artishock and Contemporyand. She recently co-edited Transition. The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, 130. Her first co-translation project, Semantic of the World, the Poetry of Romulo Bustos, will be published by New Mexico Press (2022).

 

 

Online via Zoom

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Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Stanford University
Jessica Marie Johnson Assistant Professor History Johns Hopkins University
Sonita Moss Research Associate Discussant REDI
Nohora Arrieta Fernandez Postdoctoral Fellow UCLA
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For Kate Imy, APARC’s 2021-22 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, writing feminist military history means not only “finding” or “adding” women to the stories of war, even though that is, in itself, a necessary intervention. It also means recognizing how gender shapes almost everything we know, understand, praise, or condemn about wars and militaries more broadly. Writing military history with a feminist-lens shapes Imy's understanding of how militaries are formed, who serves in them, and why they matter.

Dr. Imy joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Visiting Scholar and 2021-22 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia. Hosted jointly by APARC’s Southeast Asia Program and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore, the fellowship advances the visibility and quality of scholarship on contemporary Southeast Asia. Imy, who is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas, is using her residency at APARC during fall 2021 to research the colonial roots of winning "hearts and minds" in war, specifically focusing on Singapore and Malaya. 

On December 2 at 5 p.m. PT, Dr. Imy will present a public talk, Pregnant in the Jungle: Gendering Resistance in the Malayan Emergency, where she will discuss the reconfiguration of gender expectations in the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), a period of unrest following the creation of the Federation of Malaya that is perhaps most famous for Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer’s phrase about the need to win the “hearts and minds” of civilians to defeat a communist insurgency. Register now to join the webcast.

We caught up with Dr. Imy to discuss her work and experience at Stanford this quarter.


What has shaped your interest and research into questions of identity in British Imperial history?

I grew up in California and currently live in Texas — two influential, diverse border states where military service is prevalent. I also briefly attended the United States Air Force Academy, where I learned a lot about how race, gender, and faith shape the experience of military service. These animated my interest in the history of empires, war, race, and gender. While working on a PhD at Rutgers, I came across not one but two British officers who had an equal love for yoga and fascism — two things that I had previously considered to be rooted in opposing cultural impulses. Learning about how and why these linkages made sense have encouraged me to continue thinking critically about how war and empire shape culture.

In your current book project on the colonial origins of the "winning hearts and minds" idea of war, what is something surprising you’ve come to realize about that term?

My research in some ways is less interested in the novelty of the term than how reactionary it was to existing colonial policies. British leaders articulated the desire to “win hearts and minds” because previous generations of military and colonial leaders had failed to do so. The traumatic experiences of colonialism and war inspired civilian resistance to military occupation. In many ways, the idea of winning hearts and minds through militaries is an oxymoron because for civilians, “winning” would be an end to military occupation and violence. Most exciting to me is that many soldiers serving in the region during the colonial era — who were diverse subjects with roots in India, Nepal, East Africa, China, Australia, and New Zealand — tended to agree.

How has your time at APARC as the Lee Kong Chian Stanford-NUS Fellow aided your research project?

I have benefitted tremendously from my time at Stanford. I researched materials at the Hoover Institution related to communism in Singapore and Malaya, providing me with additional opportunities to reflect on a plurality of voices shaped by communism and anti-communism. I have had generative meetings with students and scholars that push me to think about these dynamics in new ways. My focus is currently consolidating my archival research and drafting new chapters, so having access to Stanford’s library has assisted greatly in this process. Finally, I met with a representative of an academic press in the area and am preparing a book proposal for submission by the end of my fellowship period.

Which connections made during your time at APARC have been particularly beneficial to you?

COVID has prevented some meetings but facilitated others, including through virtual events. I attended the talk by Sugata Bose on “Young Asia,” moderated by Stanford History faculty Partha Pratim Shil. I also attended the event on “Home, Land, Security” by Carla Power and moderated by Stanford anthropologist Sharika Thiranagama. I met with Stanford undergraduate student Chern Xun Gan to discuss my archival research, as he has an interest in the Malayan Emergency. At APARC, I’ve enjoyed meeting South Asia Research Scholar Arzan Tarapore, whose work on the military in South Asia overlaps with my own interest. I had a fantastic conversation with Stanford History Department Professor Priya Satia, whose expertise in British colonial histories of war has had a great impact on my research and writing. I have also benefitted from several conversations with Southeast Asia Program Director Donald Emmerson. Overall, Stanford and APARC have been welcoming and insightful places to work.

You traveled to Singapore for part of your fellowship. What did you accomplish there? Were there any special collections at NUS that you accessed?

I completed the first part of my fellowship in Singapore from March to June 2021. I spent some time in the NUS archives and meeting (remotely) with various scholars at NUS, including Maitrii Aung-Thwin and Seng Guo Quan. I also met several NTU faculty, including Jessica Hinchy, Tapsi Mathur, and Faizah Zakaria. However, the bulk of my time was spent in the National Archives. There I found immense resources related to each section of my book, including the Singapore Mutiny (1915), the Japanese occupation (1942-1945), and the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960). COVID limitations to library hours meant that I had to photograph a massive quantity of materials, which I am currently working through now. These have been especially valuable for strengthening Indian and Chinese perspectives of war in Singapore and Malaya, and I look forward to foregrounding these perspectives in my book.

What is on the horizon for you? What's next?

After leaving Stanford, I will look forward to revising my book manuscript and submitting it to a university press. This will occupy much of my focus throughout 2022, with a view to publishing the manuscript in 2023. Beyond that, I will look forward to continuing my research on war and empire in the Asia-Pacific — possibly even incorporating further research on my home state of California!

Kate Imy

Kate Imy

Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2021-2022
Full Biography.

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In this interview, Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia Kate Imy discusses her research into identity in the twentieth-century British imperial world and her current book project on the colonial roots of winning "hearts and minds" in war, specifically focusing on Malaya and Singapore.

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This article was first published by the social and political economy portal IndiaSpend.


Women from poor households made about 235,000 fewer hospital visits compared to men for seven gender-neutral disease categories between January 2017 and October 2019, a new study analyzing a Rajasthan state health insurance scheme has estimated. The Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana aims to provide health insurance to about 46 million persons living below the poverty line, as a step towards universal and equitable access to healthcare in the state, per the study.

Pascaline Dupas and Radhika Jain of Stanford University studied data of insurance claims from 4.2 million hospital visits under the Bhamashah scheme from its launch in December 2015 till October 2019, and the study was published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. The study was conducted in partnership with the Rajasthan state government.

Women made up 45% of hospital visits under the Bhamashah scheme between January 2017 and October 2019, though their share in the population is 48%, per the study. The gender gap is starker for girls and older women. The share of girls in children aged under 10 years who visited the hospital under this insurance program was 33%, though their share of this age group's population is 47%; among those aged above 50 years, women are 51%, yet their share of hospital visits under this insurance program was 43%.

"We were struck by this discrepancy in the data. We were not expecting such a large [gender] difference," Dupas, an economist and professor at Stanford University, told IndiaSpend. In most other developed countries for which such data have been analyzed, subsidized healthcare usually caters to those who otherwise don't have access to it, added Jain, a postdoctoral fellow in Asia Health Policy at Stanford University, US.

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How COVID-19 Disproportionately Impacts People with Chronic Conditions in India
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Two women standing in a street in Rajasthan, India UN Women/ Anindit Roy-Chowdhury/ Ashutosh Negi via Flickr
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A new study of the Rajasthan government's Bhamashah health insurance program for poor households has found that just providing health insurance cover doesn't reduce gender inequality in access to even subsidized health care.

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Radhika Jain
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This opinion piece was first published in the economics and policy portal Ideas for India.


Equity in healthcare is a key goal of health policy in India. Analyzing administrative data from Rajasthan, this article highlights substantial gender gaps in the utilization of subsidized hospital care under the state health insurance program. These disparities persist despite substantial program expansion and seem to be driven by households being less willing to allocate resources to female vis-à-vis male health.

Over the past 15 years, India’s central government and numerous state governments have put in place health insurance programmes that entitle low-income households to free healthcare at public and empanelled private hospitals. Health equity and universal health coverage are explicit goals of these programs. In new research, we study gender equity in the Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana (BSBY)1 health insurance program, which was launched in the state of Rajasthan in 2015, and is similar in design to the national Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY).

Our starting point is a dataset of insurance claims filed for all 4.2 million hospital visits between 2015 and 2019, including patient age, gender, residence address, hospital visited, dates of admission and discharge, and service(s) received. We geo-coded hospital locations and patient addresses, which allowed us to calculate proximity to hospitals and the distance traveled for every hospital visit. Finally, we linked the insurance data to the 2011 Census and data on three rounds of village-level (gram panchayat) elections. To our knowledge, the dataset we compiled from these various sources is the first dataset of its type in India and allows us to study care-seeking under insurance with unusual granularity.

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Stanford University researchers' study of Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana reveals that just expanding geographical access and reducing the cost of healthcare won't reduce gender disparity.

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