Research Bio

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). 

Research Expertise and Interest

disability, Japan, disability studies, queer studies, LGBTQ communities, social cultural anthropology, medical and psychiatric anthropology, community-engaged research/scholarship, community-based research partnerships