University of Edinburgh

Faculty Member, The School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures

Lecturer in Japanese Studies

About

I am Lecturer in Japanese Studies in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.  My interests include Japan, international relations, political theory, media theory, constructivism, philosophy and languages.

I am reviews editor on the SAGE journal Media, War and Conflict.  http://mwc.sagepub.com/

Professional Interests:

Two contemporary strands of work converge in my research.  First, in recent years studies of ethnicity and nationalism have moved away from ‘when’ and ‘why’ towards ‘how’ questions. The work of Billig, Calhoun, Brubaker, Erikson and Yuval-Davis have all pointed towards a theory of nation and ethnicity that takes into account how these concepts function when people make social sense of their worlds.  At the same time, work on Japan, after many years of heated debate over the ‘truth’ of the nihonjinron texts, is increasingly concerned with developing representational, phenomenological and pluralistic understandings of Japanese identity.  My thesis marries these two strands by developing the insights of the first and applying them to selected case studies in contemporary Japan.  Throughout the thesis I analyse ways in which different imaginings of the nation produce different logics of practice, as well as the work that goes on to re-imagine the nation in order to produce new potentials for socially accountable action.  This research has seen me engage with a broad and varied literature, including the phenomenological social science of Alfred Schutz and the ethnomethodologists, the constructivism of Berger and Luckmann, John Searle and Ian Hacking, theories of ideology (in particular those of Michael Freeden), theories of social memory and post-structural theories of identity.  I have also conducted fieldwork at numerous sites in Japan.

Running in parallel to my work on nationalism and Japan is an increasing interest in borders and bordering processes.  In the wake of misguided notions of globalisation bringing about a borderless world the idea of the border has firmly, if ambiguously, reasserted itself.  For many border scholars the general debate now lies in their proliferation and transformation.  I have been concerned with developing a ‘thin’ institutional approach to borders as social processes grounded in the use of language that can be applied to seemingly very different cases.  In developing this argument I have drawn upon speech act theory and the philosophy of language, constitutive constructivism, and the work of John Searle and Friedrich Kratochwil.  This research has been presented at the Norface Seminar Series on borders and has resulted in an article due to be published in the European Journal of Social Theory (with Anthony Cooper, Royal Holloway).

My research plan for the immediate future is to develop my work on borders through empirical case studies and fieldwork.  I also want to conduct qualitative research in Japan on issues of modernity, belonging and security.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:

Perkins, C. and Cooper, A. (forthcoming) European Journal of Social Theory, ‘Borders and status functions: an institutional approach to the study of borders. 

Perkins, C. 2010. ‘The Banality of Boundaries: Performances of the Nation in a Japanese Television Comedy’, Television and New Media, Vol. 11 (5): 386 – 403.

Frazer-Crawford-Boerl, C. and Perkins, C. 2010. ‘The Political Pluralisation of American Evangelicals: How old media built a movement, and why the Internet is poised to change it’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Vol. 10 (4) (page numbers to be confirmed).

Perkins, C., 2009. ‘Fixing subjectivities: the politics of belonging and achieving the nation’, Royal Holloway Department of Politics and International Relations Working Paper Series, Number 12 (June), pp. 1 -15.