Karen Nakamura
Title
Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies and Professor
Department
Dept of Anthropology
Faculty URL
Research Group
Email
Research Expertise and Interest
disability, Japan, disability studies, queer studies, LGBTQ communities, social cultural anthropology, medical and psychiatric anthropology
Research Description
Professor Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley. Her first book was titled Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006). Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). She is currently working on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan as well as a project on disability, technology, and access especially in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML).