About Me
My name is Blair. Yoroshiku.
Learn More About Me:
- My Curriculum Vitae (on Google Docs)
At A Glance:
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My Writing:Blogs: Projects: You can view specifics about my larger writing projects by clicking links at the top of the page. Digital copies of my writing can provided upon request. |
About this website:
I aim to find methods of making information accessible. We are all students of life and information, and as academia embraces more and more the growing sphere of influence of the internet I aim to collaborate and assist those whose goals are to further historical, contemporary, and future understandings of Japan and East Asia.
About my research:
I believe the science aspect of the social sciences is to provide analytics to research events and historical structures. I don’t adhere to a single approach toward history, but my research is largely influenced by science, technology, and society studies (STS), and increasingly informed by anthropology, cultural studies, and postmodern/posthumanist philosophy.
About my view on baseball:
I believe the representation of baseball by academics, the media, and its players lacks a full description of the reality of the politics, economics, cultural, historical, and social aspects. That is to say, there is no singular concept of baseball, and there is no ‘nationalized’ way of playing baseball. In particular, I believe one of the most salient sites of confusion in the discourse about baseball occurs between the transition of players between Japan and America. For that reason, I focus on understanding these players via Japanese and American media, but I also have a bit of fun in showing their performance in a video or projecting their statistics.
I am appreciative of the works of Robert Whiting, which have formed the dominant narrative about Japanese baseball. However, through my nascent academic works, I have been highly critical of his claims, deployment of evidence, and interpretations of the historical structure of baseball. My own interpretations derive from the influences listed above, and aim to expand the concept of baseball from simple materialism to incorporate historical structures, to address contemporary global and localization movements, and to complicate narratives in order to avoid ‘essentialism’ and ‘singularities’ in the narrative.