Noriko Muraki
I am a Ph.D. candidate in socio-cultural anthropology. I received a B.A. in English Literature from Waseda University in 1984. For more than ten years I worked for Japanese companies in Tokyo before pursuing graduate studies in the United States. I earned an M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Northern Iowa in 1999. I conducted my dissertation field research in 2001 and between 2003 and 2004 supported by SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and defended my dissertation in May 2008. My dissertation, entitled “Citizen Professionals: College Women, Care Work, and the Transformation of Middle Class Subjectivity in Post-Bubble Japan,” examines the changing subjectivities of female college students at non-elite universities in the contexts of neo-liberal restructuring of higher education, social welfare, and the youth labor market in Japan’s transforming political economy, and amid a prevailing sense of Japan’s “post-bubble” cultural crisis. It argues that while college women are positioned in an anxious space created by the labor market’s and universities’ legitimizing efforts at professionalization of social welfare and psychology, many of the young women creatively forge alternative meanings of middle class citizenship in the processes of opting for care work by affirming the work as professional careers. By so doing, I also argue that they have the potential to destabilize boundaries conventionally accompanied with labor, such as professional and service, mental and manual. By capturing a moment of transforming gendered professionalism through women’s meaning-making and self-fashioning in a new era, my dissertation offers a new and better understanding of the impacts of neo-liberal global restructuring on the transformation of subjectivity and cultural citizenship of female youth in a post-bubble Japan.