In particular, it considers the questions of when, why, and for whom it becomes necessary to be multicultural to be appreciated as modern.
The book concludes with a return to “the labor of multiculturalism” as a way of understanding the conditions that give rise to the demand that Japan appear multicultural and that raise the stakes for Buraku people, international norms, and Japan. This chapter is an attempt to include digital technologies, and particularly the case of online participatory platforms based on geographic information systems (GIS), in the array of creative and visual research methods. However, the original and collaborative practices in which they can develop, as well as their possibilities towards more democratic and inclusive participation processes, remain an unexplored domain.
We already know how digital tools may influence the performance of research methods, mainly by maximizing the efficiency of data collection and elaboration. The knowledge creation process in the digital era, including forms of research communication, can be profoundly different from traditional research methods. The conservativeness of traditional scientific methods, which nevertheless still tend to dominate much of the (social) sustainability sciences, is challenged by technological progress when untested tools of research are proposed as innovative scientific methods. Finally, we summarize our main points and provide future directions of discussion. This section is meant to contribute to defining “truly” creative methods by spelling out what they are not. Third, we sketch out a definition of forced creativity and illustrate two applied cases of how it might look in practice: “artwashing” and “funding tricks”. Second, we outline the fundamental properties of the managerial university, summarized as: (i) accountability, (ii) competition, and (iii) obedience. First, we provide an historical accounting of how managerial values have contributed to de-politicization in the wider public sphere, with a particular focus on academia. We point towards the constraints it places on those who wish to take a creative approach. In an attempt to avoid this, we provide a picture and discuss the institutional framework in which creative methods are deployed to understand and critique the values and practices of managerialism in academia.
We see the entrenchment of managerialism as contradictory to the stated aims of the application of creative methods in knowledge production. As managerialism-here understood as the application of corporate values and practices into all sectors of society-continues to play a large role in the production and creation of knowledge, we argue that creative methods have the potential to either subvert or reinforce these trends. This chapter aims to put creative methods into the context of wider trends in university institutions.
Through an ethnographic history of the nonprofit arts space Cocoroom, I contribute to the anthropology of gentrification by focusing on entrepreneurial forms of creativity in local arts organizations, which reveal historical transformations of public space in Japanese urban policy, and highlight the symbolic performances of marginal communities. In this paper, I focus on a working‐class district of South Osaka known as Kamagasaki, infamous for its longstanding population of day laborers and homeless, in which gentrification has taken a complex route through various projects of cultural representation. Gentrification is recognizable across contemporary urban societies, but its practices are contingent on representations of local cultural expression, which have particular ramifications in postindustrial centers of urban Japan. In contemporary Japanese cities, nonprofit and grassroots arts organizations are mobilized in threatened urban neighborhoods, where neoliberal forms of creativity are invoked to mitigate social and economic displacement.