Papers by Anne S Aronsson
Special issue “Robots and Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare in Japan and South Korea” in journal East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 2023
Japanese care centers have seen an increasing reliance on robotic assistance in service and socia... more Japanese care centers have seen an increasing reliance on robotic assistance in service and social-care tasks, which poses questions about ethics, governance, and caregiving practices. This article addresses the concept of robotics as a media technology, and the role of human agency in shaping imagination as an interpretive framework as it reflects on two specific points of debate; (1) whether the humanoid robot Pepper, deployed in an elder-care nursing home in Japan, has some form of agency in its interaction with a nursing home resident; and (2) whether appropriate anthropological debates about being (properly reframed with regard to difference) provide insight into the reality of robot care. Adapting an approach by anthropologist Boellstorff (2016), whose work focuses on the reality of virtual worlds, this article analyzes whether questions regarding the real of robot care are questions of being, i.e. of ontology. Conflating the interhuman with the real and the robotic with the unreal—or, in this case, conflating human care with the real (authentic) and robot care with the unreal (artificial)—can negatively affect our ability to discuss the reality of the robotic. The ontological turn can yield important insights, but its potential is lost if what is real is preassigned to the physical.
The elder population in Japan is increasing drastically, causing a number of issues that have not... more The elder population in Japan is increasing drastically, causing a number of issues that have not yet surfaced in most Western countries. Demographic data from Japan reveal that the Japanese have the longest lifespan globally, resulting in the world's highest population of older adults. Concurrently, the country has a rapidly declining birth rate. As the population ages, the workforce is shrinking and leaving a high number of elders with fewer caregivers to meet their needs. At present, the Japanese government is developing robotic care solutions to overcome the elder care labor shortage and implementing a new agenda to introduce social robots into the field. This article discusses professional women in Japan and their burden of caring for aging relatives and how introducing robotic care devices might reduce current anxieties regarding the provision of elder care. It analyzes the elder care strategies of 12 white-collar professional women in their forties and fifties and examines the extent to which gendered, expected at-home caregiving affects their professional commitments and associated anxieties. The findings below provide crucial insight into the most effective strategies that can be used by Japanese women to balance their careers with responsibilities to care for older relatives, particularly when it is impossible to predict the intensity of caregiving in the future.
Japan is a hyper-aging society, and its government is encouraging robotic solutions to address el... more Japan is a hyper-aging society, and its government is encouraging robotic solutions to address elder care labor shortage. Therefore, authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots. However, increasing numbers of people in Japan are becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines, and their introduction into elder care may thus be perceived as contentious. By exploring human engagement with social robots in the care context, this paper argues that rapid technological advances in the twenty-first century will see robots achieve some level of agency, contributing to human society by carving out unique roles for themselves and by bonding with humans. Nevertheless, the questions remain of whether there should be a difference between humans attributing agency to a being and those beings having the inherent ability to produce agency and how we might understand that difference if unable to access the minds of other humans, let alone nonhumans, some of which are not even alive in the classical sense. Using the example of an interaction between an elderly woman and a social robot, we engage with these questions; discuss linguistic, attributed, and inherent agencies; and suggest that a processual type of agency might be most appropriate for understanding human-robot interaction.
The Anthropocene Review, 2020
In this essay, we reevaluate the 2019 outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) from the persp... more In this essay, we reevaluate the 2019 outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) from the perspective of multispecies entanglements. It is argued that anthropogenic alterations in the biosphere will most likely accelerate the rate of multispecies pandemics in the Anthropocene. Using a textual analysis approach of anthropological and historical sources on the example of coronaviruses and live animal markets in China, we trace how the virosphere of wild animals from tropical regions comes into contact with the virosphere of humans and farmed animals in highly industrialized landscapes. We suggest that adopting a multispecies perspective on viruses can allow them to be understood as living processes that interact with other species in a realm called the virosphere. The rate at which novel infectious diseases are transmitted by bacteria and viruses has increased in recent decades. We argue that this is caused by side effects of the Anthropocene, such as deforestation, the surge in population growth and density, and anthropogenic climate change, which give rise to an increased number of unusual encounters between humans, nonhuman companion species, and wild animals. In this way, the virospheres of host organisms, which were formerly partly isolated, are allowed to converge and freely exchange infectious diseases, leading to a more homogenized virosphere. As anthropogenic alterations are set to continue in the future, we suggest that multispecies pandemics will likely increase in the following decades.
Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology , 2020
As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life
expectancies and is undergoing... more As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life
expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that
Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese
government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage
in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda
of introducing social robots to assist in elder care. However,
Japanese society is increasingly experiencing the phenomenon of
people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic
machines such as social robots, and the introduction of social
robots into the realm of elder care can be perceived as
contentious by elders, caregivers, and family members. By
exploring human engagement with social robots within the care
context, this paper argues that introducing emotional
technologies into the care equation neither provides the same
kind of experiences as human–human interactions nor is
necessarily psychologically deceptive, but gives rise to new
relationships and ways of interacting.
The Qualitative Report, 2020
In this article, I explore what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today’... more In this article, I explore what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today’s neoliberal economy and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. I ask why and how one fourth of Japanese women stay on a career track, often against considerable odds, while the other three fourths drop out of the workforce. Employment trends indicate that more white-collar professional women are breaking through the “glass ceiling” and more women are now filling managerial posts. These trends have been supported by the recession, which has led to the liberalization of career paths that fit with women’s tendencies to engage in short-term and part-time work. Through snowball sampling, I carried out in-depth interviews with thirty-eight women in their forties for eighteen months (between 2007 and 2010), and I conducted follow-up interviews with a selected group of these women (between 2014 and 2018). The women in this group had been in their careers long enough to be able to look back on their professional and private experiences. As I show in this article, the forties appear to be a turning point, because this age represents their first opportunity to take the time to reflect on their careers and to redress the imbalance between their professional and private lives.
The Journal of Headache and Pain , 2017
Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust ar... more Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust are two literary works that represent milestones in world literature, the former the most central work in Japanese literature and the second a culmination in the poetic achievement of one of Germany’s leading poets. The Tale of Genji was written around the year 1000 AC, during the Heian period, a time when aristocrats highly valued the fine arts, such as poetry, in the form of waka 和歌 or tanka 短歌, literature in general, music and calligraphy. Faust, on the other hand, was written seven hundred years later, during the early nineteenth century. Writers of this period adopted the classical world of Greek antiquity as their model, with the national literature focusing on an idealized picture of mankind and striving to combine reason and sentiment, mind and nature. While, of course, a huge body of criticism has emerged around both The Tale of Genji and Faust, no one has yet compared these two works. Genji and Faust, the two protagonists, are exceptional individuals: Genji transcends the conventional limitations of mankind, while Faust aspires to transcend them. They represent individuals who surpass all other human beings because of their superior intellects, conviction, vision and courage.
I compare these two protagonists, even though the literary works belong to different periods in human history as well as different cultures. Despite these differences, there are striking similarities in how the writers portray these exceptional individuals. Juxtaposing Genji and Faust illuminates the universal yearning to transcend the realms of human commonality. Through their ambitious actions they both often challenge social and religious principles. My analysis reveals how this yearning and the defiance of religious limitations play out against two entirely distinct religious traditions. First, I introduce each character briefly and discuss why these protagonists seem so otherworldly. Second, taking into account the respective religious backgrounds of these works as a whole, I analyze the transgressions in which the characters entangle themselves as they strive toward lofty aims. Third, I define the limitations of comparison regarding their atonement and potential salvation.
Books by Anne S Aronsson
Routledge, 2015
Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolut... more Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms.
This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation.
Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.
Book Reviews by Anne S Aronsson
The Journal of Japanese Studies, 2021
Over the past decade, a swath of writing has emerged that hones in on women and gender roles in J... more Over the past decade, a swath of writing has emerged that hones in on women and gender roles in Japan; the most notable of these contributions are Too Few Women at the Top by Kumiko Nemoto (2016), Nancy Rosenberger’s Dilemmas of Adulthood (2013), Susan Holloway’s Women and Family in Contemporary Japan (2010), and Torben Iversen’s and Frances Rosenbluth’s Women, Work, and Politics (2010), each of which offers a voice to Japanese women across all social, political, and economic backgrounds.
Joining these influential analyses of the modern role of women in domes-
tic, political, and business spheres—and the influences that have shaped
them—is the edited volume of Gill Steel, Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan
(2019), a succinct yet powerful book involving the close interplay between
detailed, contextualized understanding of gender inequality across various
topics and theoretical ideas emerging from that understanding.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021
Swee-Lin Ho examines the work and work-related activities of Japanese white-collar women in urban... more Swee-Lin Ho examines the work and work-related activities of Japanese white-collar women in urban night space and how they form their notions of selfhood and social relationships. Ho argues that little is understood about women’s social experiences while participating in traditionally male-dominated workplace social activities in Japan. She contends that the importance of individual autonomy in friendship in particular is understudied in anthropological literature. Ho’s ethnographic focus centers on women’s friendship ties, which have little or no association with the home, community, or office, providing them with a sense of liberation from the stressful demands imposed on them. These friendship ties constitute the third of a total of three zones, with the first being the private domain and the second being the workplace in the public sphere.
The book offers detailed knowledge on major issues to benefit both health and social care workers... more The book offers detailed knowledge on major issues to benefit both health and social care workers and those who are simply interested in the subject, and it does so in a clear and rational way. The message of Transcultural Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Health and Social Care is driven by hope and a resolve that AI and SARs in health and social care might make our lives better. As such, I have no hesitation in recommending this book, which is insightful, clear, and useful. Hence, I give potential readers a very high recommendation as the book is accessible and clarifying, and it will be useful to researchers and students alike, both in college and graduate classrooms. The book’s pragmatic approach makes a valuable contribution to several fields―anthropology, sociology, nursing, and robotics―and also provides useful insights for policy makers working in health-related fields."
Social Science Japan Journal , 2023
Madness in the Family (2022) shows that the burden of caring for those afflicted by mental illnes... more Madness in the Family (2022) shows that the burden of caring for those afflicted by mental illness in Meiji Japan (after 1868) primarily fell on women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, in-laws, and other close family relations, even as those roles were themselves rapidly changing. This book contributes to our understanding of gender, work, and family in an evolving non-Western context.
Kim examines how Western psychological concepts were adopted during the late nineteenth century, demonstrating how more conventional terms and beliefs coexisted with these models. Kim uses the term “madness” to describe a wide range of scientific, quasi-scientific, religious, and folkloric ways of understanding aberrant behavior. Prominent explanations for women’s mental issues include animal spirits, blocked energy (ki) channels, and menstrual cycles. She avoids framing change during this period as a progression from superstition to science, and makes few claims regarding the efficacy of particular forms of treatment.
A plethora of works explore the difficulties, travails, and traditional perceptions of women of a... more A plethora of works explore the difficulties, travails, and traditional perceptions of women of all socioeconomic and political backgrounds in Japan, while serving to provide a voice for these women. The most notable contributions are Women and Family in Contemporary Japan (Holloway 2010), Too Few Women at the Top (Nemoto 2016), Reworking Japan: Changing Men at Work and Play Under Neoliberalism (Gagné 2021), Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy (Lukács 2020), Dilemmas of Adulthood (Rosenberger 2014), and Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan (Steel 2019). Joining these influential analyses of the modern role of women in domestic, political, and business spheres—and the influences that shape them—is Lynne Nakano’s Making Our Own Destiny: Single Women, Opportunity, and Family in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo (2022). This powerful book looks at why singlehood is increasing in East Asia’s major cities—Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. In these places, not only have a majority never been married, but a significant portion will never marry. Are hundreds of thousands of women in their thirties and forties who reside in East Asian cities adopting novel values?
Social Science Japan Journal , 2022
Over the past 10 years, a plethora of works have explored the position of women and gender roles ... more Over the past 10 years, a plethora of works have explored the position of women and gender roles in Japan (e.g. Iversen and Rosenbluth 2010; Rosenberger 2014; Nemoto 2016; Steel 2019). They each give Japanese women a voice in multiple social, economic, and political contexts. Gabriella Lukács’ Invisibility by Design adds to these influential works by investigating how digital technologies use and hide young women’s labor by taking advantage of inequalities in the local labor market and shows how technological developments are based on the socio-economic contexts in which they emerge. Lukács’ work is the latest addition to an emerging literature that explores new types of labor and the ways in which capitalist accumulation strives to make profits from activities not considered productive. She writes that ‘[i]n Japan the digital economy evolved in parallel with the deregulation of the labor market’ (2), and, as such, the digital economy is built on innovating Karl Marx’s labor theory of value. Instead of paying workers only for socially necessary labor time, ‘owners of online platforms generate profits by not recognizing online activities of platform users as labor’ (157), which includes emotional, immaterial, affective, articulation, phatic, intimate, reproductive, care, and hope labor.
Drafts by Anne S Aronsson
Journal of Medical Anthropology as part of special issue "Medical Politics in East Asia", 2025
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light the importance of medical professionals in politics. T... more The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light the importance of medical professionals in politics. Throughout East Asia, biomedical experts have overseen the measures of population management, although in Japan they were not as strictly enforced as in neighboring countries. Ever since the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese state’s claim to legitimacy inheres in the notion of kokutai (the national body), which, especially post-pandemic, is seen as not just political, but bio-political. This paper focuses on the relationship between doctors and the state in the aftermath of the pandemic, exploring how it underpins the way the country prepares to move from one crisis to the next.
Book chapter by Anne S Aronsson
Book chapter in "The Future of Humans and Machines – Narratives from Culture and Literature", 2024
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Papers by Anne S Aronsson
expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that
Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese
government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage
in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda
of introducing social robots to assist in elder care. However,
Japanese society is increasingly experiencing the phenomenon of
people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic
machines such as social robots, and the introduction of social
robots into the realm of elder care can be perceived as
contentious by elders, caregivers, and family members. By
exploring human engagement with social robots within the care
context, this paper argues that introducing emotional
technologies into the care equation neither provides the same
kind of experiences as human–human interactions nor is
necessarily psychologically deceptive, but gives rise to new
relationships and ways of interacting.
I compare these two protagonists, even though the literary works belong to different periods in human history as well as different cultures. Despite these differences, there are striking similarities in how the writers portray these exceptional individuals. Juxtaposing Genji and Faust illuminates the universal yearning to transcend the realms of human commonality. Through their ambitious actions they both often challenge social and religious principles. My analysis reveals how this yearning and the defiance of religious limitations play out against two entirely distinct religious traditions. First, I introduce each character briefly and discuss why these protagonists seem so otherworldly. Second, taking into account the respective religious backgrounds of these works as a whole, I analyze the transgressions in which the characters entangle themselves as they strive toward lofty aims. Third, I define the limitations of comparison regarding their atonement and potential salvation.
Books by Anne S Aronsson
This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation.
Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.
Book Reviews by Anne S Aronsson
Joining these influential analyses of the modern role of women in domes-
tic, political, and business spheres—and the influences that have shaped
them—is the edited volume of Gill Steel, Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan
(2019), a succinct yet powerful book involving the close interplay between
detailed, contextualized understanding of gender inequality across various
topics and theoretical ideas emerging from that understanding.
Kim examines how Western psychological concepts were adopted during the late nineteenth century, demonstrating how more conventional terms and beliefs coexisted with these models. Kim uses the term “madness” to describe a wide range of scientific, quasi-scientific, religious, and folkloric ways of understanding aberrant behavior. Prominent explanations for women’s mental issues include animal spirits, blocked energy (ki) channels, and menstrual cycles. She avoids framing change during this period as a progression from superstition to science, and makes few claims regarding the efficacy of particular forms of treatment.
Drafts by Anne S Aronsson
Book chapter by Anne S Aronsson
expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that
Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese
government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage
in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda
of introducing social robots to assist in elder care. However,
Japanese society is increasingly experiencing the phenomenon of
people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic
machines such as social robots, and the introduction of social
robots into the realm of elder care can be perceived as
contentious by elders, caregivers, and family members. By
exploring human engagement with social robots within the care
context, this paper argues that introducing emotional
technologies into the care equation neither provides the same
kind of experiences as human–human interactions nor is
necessarily psychologically deceptive, but gives rise to new
relationships and ways of interacting.
I compare these two protagonists, even though the literary works belong to different periods in human history as well as different cultures. Despite these differences, there are striking similarities in how the writers portray these exceptional individuals. Juxtaposing Genji and Faust illuminates the universal yearning to transcend the realms of human commonality. Through their ambitious actions they both often challenge social and religious principles. My analysis reveals how this yearning and the defiance of religious limitations play out against two entirely distinct religious traditions. First, I introduce each character briefly and discuss why these protagonists seem so otherworldly. Second, taking into account the respective religious backgrounds of these works as a whole, I analyze the transgressions in which the characters entangle themselves as they strive toward lofty aims. Third, I define the limitations of comparison regarding their atonement and potential salvation.
This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation.
Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.
Joining these influential analyses of the modern role of women in domes-
tic, political, and business spheres—and the influences that have shaped
them—is the edited volume of Gill Steel, Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan
(2019), a succinct yet powerful book involving the close interplay between
detailed, contextualized understanding of gender inequality across various
topics and theoretical ideas emerging from that understanding.
Kim examines how Western psychological concepts were adopted during the late nineteenth century, demonstrating how more conventional terms and beliefs coexisted with these models. Kim uses the term “madness” to describe a wide range of scientific, quasi-scientific, religious, and folkloric ways of understanding aberrant behavior. Prominent explanations for women’s mental issues include animal spirits, blocked energy (ki) channels, and menstrual cycles. She avoids framing change during this period as a progression from superstition to science, and makes few claims regarding the efficacy of particular forms of treatment.