Current work
Research
My research examines psychiatry, addiction, criminal justice, and migration in contemporary Japan. I study psychiatric therapeutics through personhood and evidence, including the criminalization of mental illness, court process, emotions and affect, citizenship, and knowledge produced by people with lived experience of illness, drug use, incarceration, and recovery.
Book project
Conducting Addiction
Psychiatry, Criminalization, and Coproduction in Japan
Conducting Addiction is an ethnography of addiction psychiatry, criminal justice, and peer recovery in Japan. It examines how psychiatric accounts of addiction are used in court to judge responsibility and punishment, how criminalization structures treatment and recovery, and how peer communities transform experiences of drug use, incarceration, and relapse into therapeutic concepts and research practices. The manuscript is in conversation with a university press.
Articles from this research have appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethnography, SSM – Qualitative Research in Health (SSM–QRH), Contemporary Drug Problems, Psychiatry (Seishin Iryō), and Somatosphere.
Ongoing research
Peer Research & Recovery
My continuing research in Hokkaido, Mie, and Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Centers throughout Japan examines peer research and the cultural practices of recovery. I am particularly interested in tōjisha kenkyū (当事者研究), peer-led inquiry in which lived experience becomes a basis for concepts, methods, and collaborative research, and in the institutional and spiritual traditions through which autonomous recovery communities have developed in Japan.
At the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, I am also involved in separate public-health research on harm reduction, expert-peer coproduction, and refugee mental health.
Research project
Migration & Therapeutic Citizenship
My second research project concerns psychiatric care and precarious immigration status in Japan. I follow asylum seekers and migrants released from immigration detention as they seek medical care, welfare, housing, and protection from renewed detention. The research examines how psychiatric diagnosis and documentation become consequential within immigration and welfare institutions, and how legal status conditions access to care.
Articles from this research have appeared or are forthcoming in Current Anthropology and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
Research project
Open Dialogue
Another project concerns Open Dialogue, a networked and dialogic tradition in contemporary psychiatry. Drawing on practitioner training and ethnographic research in Japan, I examine how reflection, suspended judgment, and changes in clinical hierarchy relocate psychiatric problems from an individual pathology to relations among patients, families, clinicians, and others present in treatment.