Hiroki Igarashi

Bio: Hiroki Igarashi is an academic researcher from Chiba University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Globalization & Cosmopolitanism. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 5 publications receiving 234 citations. Previous affiliations of Hiroki Igarashi include University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification

Abstract: In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital their families possess. We then explore how education systems undergird profitability of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital by linking academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitan dispositions with the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple...

Deliberative Planning in a Multicultural Milieu

Abstract: This article explores the utility of deliberative planning theory given the scholarly debate over its limitations and prospects. A case study situated in the Japanese city of Kawasaki illustrates how deliberative planning theory can illuminate the limitations of deliberative planning theory and practice while revealing potential paths to create more democratic and inclusive planning processes. The case underscores the importance of (1) public acknowledgement of the constraints to deliberative planning, (2) deliberating over the design of a deliberative process, (3) mitigating identified constraints to deliberative planning, and (4) being open to alternative or parallel strategies given structural and other constraints in deliberative processes.

Privileged Japanese transnational families in Hawaii as lifestyle migrants

Abstract: This study of privileged Japanese families in Hawaii revisits the claim that East Asian transnational families relocate overseas either to improve their well-being or to enhance their status through their children's international education. Existing scholarship has focused mainly on the second pattern of status-seeking migration, conceptualized as ‘education migration’. By employing Benson and O'Reilly's concept of ‘lifestyle migration’, I consider the less widely studied case of migration strategies designed to increase well-being. The central difference between the two types of migrants lies in the way that migrant women construct their gendered identity through their transnational split-household arrangement – a freer self (lifestyle migrants) or a sacrificial self (education migrants). In conclusion, I call for further research on this neglected topic and propose an important dimension to facilitate lifestyle migration, gender.

The Transnational Negotiation of Selfhood, Motherhood and Wifehood: The Subjectivities of Japanese Women through Oyako-Ryūgaku in Hawaii:

Abstract: The existing scholarship on middle and upper-class East Asian transnational families accompanying their children to English-speaking countries has mainly focused on long-term transnational migration pattern. However, we know less about the short-term pattern, and how it affects the subjectivities of migrants. By conducting a case study of Japanese women participating in oyako-ryūgaku (a short-term parent-child study abroad trip) with their children in Hawaii, we demonstrate how they constructed their transnational gendered subjectivities. We argue that not only motherhood and selfhood, but also wifehood is actively negotiated among the short-term transnational mothers through oyako-ryūgaku.

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Abstract: By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Planning in the Face of Power.

Abstract: Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Abstract: Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Pp. xxii + 196, preface, introduction, acknowledgments, notes, index. $24.95 cloth, $15.95 paper) Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism is meant as a guide for identifying and confronting complex ethical issues in a multi-perspectival world. Its author, an Oxford-educated philosopher of Ghanaian-British parentage, bridges worlds. The term cosmopolitanism - the author prefers it over globalizations narrow association with economics and multiculturalismi observed tendency to prescribe - encompasses two core values: "the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even formal ties of a shared citizenship," and the idea "that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance" (xv). Terms such as tolerance, kindness, and pluralism are central to cosmopolitan thinking. Appiah presents a wide range of issues that can serve as frames through which to examine how we as individuals and professionals make ethical decisions - essential for the humanities scholar, student, and public-sector folklorist: How real are values? What do we talk about when we talk about differences? Is any form of relativism right? When do morals and manners clash? Can culture be owned? What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity? And all this is good... and yet, and yet. Too often, the resolutions Appiah proposes for these key issues are so one-sided and misleading, so bolstered by irrelevant, erroneous, and outdated sources, that they are of little help in sorting through the paradoxical interfaces of pluralism and autonomy, diversity and democracy, and globalization and protection of what is valuable in the local. In his central chapter, "Cosmopolitan Contamination," Appiah proposes a change of priorities - away from purity, peoples, authenticity, tribalism, and cultural protection, and toward individuals, mixture, modernity, rights, and what he calls contamination (his term for healthy hybridization) . His philosophical underpinning ("The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals - not nations, tribes or 'peoples' - as die proper object of moral concern" [Appiah 2006] ) is a hallmark of rightist thought and practice. The left emphasizes social, political, and environmental factors that can constrain the ability of individuals to choose freely. Both perspectives are needed, but only one is developed in this book. Many folklorists are familiar with issues of cultural change and preservation as discussed at UNESCO and WIPO. Appiah reveals no understanding of the complexities of diese dynamics. He wrongly assumes many anthropologists to be cultural relativists who tolerate such practices as female genital mutilation (15) and that UNESCO's Declaration of Cultural Diversity celebrates a pluralism that could embrace the likes of the KKK conveniently ignoring Article IV: "No one may invoke cultural diversity to infringe upon human right. …

The cosmopolitan vision

Abstract: Sociology was born as an attempt to delimit an object of investigation offered by society as a social reality. The ambition was that of “treating the social facts as things” (Durkheim) or of understanding and explaining the social relations by respecting an “axiological neutrality” (Max Weber). Today, however, we are in the presence of a new kind of sociologists, and they are by no means the less popular ones, who are not trying to avoid assessments in their analysis of the present social world. I have in mind especially two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London). I will discuss in particular the view of sociology presented in a recent book of Ulrich Beck (Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, 2002, translated into French under the title Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir a l’ere de la mondialisation, 2003), and I will show some analogies between Beck and Held. Finally, I will try to identify the points hat make the present sociological epistemology different from that of the great founders of this science.

Equality and Partiality.

Abstract: This collection of essays, based on the Locke Lectures that Nagel delivered at Oxford University in 1990, addresses the conflict between the claims of the group and those of the individual. Nagel attempts to clarify the nature of the conflict - one of the most fundamental problems in moral and political theory - and concludes that its reconciliation is the essential task of any legitimate political system.