Abstract

How are social relations in global households in Asia changing as a result of the barriers erected to flows of goods, money, and people in the wake of Covid-19? Millions of households in Asia depend on the income, labor, and other resources of members residing overseas. In this pilot project, researchers will collaborate with nongovernmental organizations run by and for Filipinas married to Japanese and Korean men in Japan and South Korea to develop innovative, socially distanced, collaborative research methodologies with the goal of generating an online audiovisual archive of qualitative data that can be used—by social scientists, NGOs, social service agencies, and the research participants themselves—to understand how the pandemic has altered the composition, income, labor-sharing, and daily routines of such households. This grassroots transnational perspective is crucial to understanding the short- and long-term effects of Covid-19 in a global era.

Principal Investigator

Cathryn Clayton

Associate Professor and Chair, Asian Studies Program, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Bio

Cathryn H. Clayton, associate professor and chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, will lead the research team in this project. A cultural anthropologist by training, her teaching and research explore questions of Chineseness—how and why it becomes a compelling form of collective subjectivity (be it nationalist, ethnic, racial, diasporic, regional, civilizational) at different points in time and space. Her first book, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness, won the 2010 Francis L.K. Hsu Award for best new book on East Asia from the Society for East Asian Anthropology in the American Anthropological Association. A graduate of Williams College (BA), Stanford University (MA), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (PhD), she has taught at UH-Manoa since 2006.