Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Maria Telegina and Project Assistant Professor Shiori Shakuto Awarded JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
We are pleased to announce that Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Maria Telegina and Project Assistant Professor Shiori Shakuto have each been awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists.
Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Maria Telegina was awarded the grant for a project titled “Time and Space in Contemporary Japanese through Comparative Investigation of Japanese and English Mental Lexicon Structures and Strategies of Temporal and Spatial Description.”
Project summary:
Space and time are at the core of human perception. We think and talk in spatial and temporal terms all the time without even noticing. However, in the context of global scholarship, time and space concepts of the contemporary Japanese language are largely terra incognita. In this project, through analysis of textual and experimental data within the framework of cognitive linguistics, Dr. Telegina will conduct a parallel investigation of the two domains of mental lexicon and strategies of temporal and spatial description in English and Japanese. Such a mode of research will allow her to detect universal and culture-specific features of the spatio-temporal domain of the Japanese mental lexicon, further develop novel typologies of spatial and temporal description she proposed in her previous work, and build an environment for the investigation of other fundamental domains of the Japanese mental lexicon.
Project Assistant Professor Shiori Shakuto was awarded the grant for a project titled “Beyond work-life balance: A feminist anthropological approach to gender equality.”
Project summary:
As is evident from the term “work-life balance,” up to this point, we have treated “work” and “life” as separate things and have sought to achieve better balance between the two. However, the coronavirus pandemic has, in an instant, tossed the two together into a blender. The spread of “work-from-home” arrangements has pushed us to consider the deep flaws in some of our key categories, particularly the separation of “work” and “life” that underlies the concept of work-life balance. This research will build ethnographic accounts of how practices and values cultivated in the feminized, private spheres of everyday lives shape the masculinized, public spaces and practices of political work in contemporary Japan. Dr. Shakuto will unpack the private domains as a multifaceted site of value production, and use these insights to build a feminist anthropological approach to gender equality that goes beyond “work-life balance” to revalue home in work itself.
JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research <Kakenhi> are awarded on a competitive basis and are intended to significantly develop all scientific research, from basic to applied research in all fields. The grants provide financial support for creative and pioneering research projects that will become the foundation of social development.
