| 研究実績の概要 |
My research assistant and I spent much of the year collecting and coding data related to representations of national handling of COVID 19. In particular, as governments scaled back from emphatic claims about their successes in handling the COVID pandemic, we examined the roles that local narratives about the disease were playing, often in unanticipated ways, in national debates.
This has led to a rethinking of the main outputs of this research project. On the one hand, there are issues of international strategy, positioning, and status in which putative national success with COVID has been nearly silenced as a theme. And on the other, we have local debates about the meanings of the pandemic. One surprising outcome has been in the ways in which COVID 19, by potentially fitting within other sets of policy goals, could actually help to fulfill emotional framing that might have seemed out of step with the panic and alarm in the peak waves of the pandemic.
And so during the year, in addition to refocusing my theoretical attention on the structure and language of narrative, as well as its changing place in debates about politics and international relations, I turned to the local debates over COVID-19. One important one seems to have been in the way it served as the wellspring of Prime Minister Kishida's "Digital Garden City" initiatives, in which the changing work styles associated with the pandemic fit into broader representations of hope, nostalgia, and bucolic transformation in Japan's outlying regions.
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| 現在までの達成度 (区分) |
現在までの達成度 (区分)
3: やや遅れている
理由
The continuing shift -- one might even use the term "memory holing" -- of COVID-19 in international relations debates has been one of the more unexpected developments in global politics. Needless to say, while international public health authorities are still learning from the experience, it has been far to the periphery of status claims in the region. Rather than try to force a research outcome that would be inaccurate, I shifted direction a bit and have worked with my co-author to craft an article on internal and unexpected debates about COVID while also approaching the relationships between narrative and strategy more theoretically and broadly. That is, I am currently examining what it has meant that a central topic in global politics has virtually disappeared from diplomatic debates.
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| 今後の研究の推進方策 |
I am currently drafting two articles. One is nearly complete, and examines the domestic politics of COVID-19 in Japan, focusing especially on its unexpected emotional valences. It looks in particular in the ways in which, due to administrative changes as well as longer-term concerns in Japanese politics, the pandemic became a kind of trigger of hope, particularly given the possibilities of disruption of population concentration in urban areas and the seeming promise of remote work and life in Japan's peripheral regions. This manuscript is roughly 80% complete and will be submitted by late spring or early summer.
The 2nd is about 25% complete and examines narratives of conflict and strategy in the region, largely as a way of pointing out the analytical problems of "narrative" as a construct.
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