Andrea Gevurtz Arai ed., "Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Dec 27, 2025

Andrea Gevurtz Arai, a cultural anthropologist and Acting Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, dives into grassroots social change in East Asia. She discusses the intersection of art, activism, and everyday resistance against neoliberalism. Arai highlights inspiring projects led by young people, particularly women, who are reshaping their communities through creativity and solidarity. She delves into the impact of the Fukushima disaster and how it shifted narratives on environment and energy, showcasing how localized actions can forge new possibilities for the future.

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INSIGHT

Collective Turns Against Neoliberal Individuation

Young people in East Asia create change by collectively rejecting individualized neoliberal promises.
They build alternative lives and communities that reconfigure labor, time, and place.

ADVICE

Build Cross-Regional Conversations Virtually

Foster cross-regional conversation: invite scholars and activists from different East Asian countries to share methods and local cases.
Use virtual workshops and classes to build comparative understanding when travel is limited.

INSIGHT

Small-P Politics Build Possible Futures

Small-p politics matter because everyday practices create the conditions for larger political change.
Building shared spaces and practices renders new futures imaginable and visible.

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An exciting collection of stories of change that most people don’t usually hear from the bottom up, from the grassroots, about what’s happening in East Asia.

Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others for a collection that addresses the last two decades' hollowing out of social connections, socioeconomic income gaps, and general precarity of life in East Asian societies.

Written by authors from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, each chapter is focused on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and environments - both built and natural. These projects all constitute acts of creative resistance to neoliberal development, and each act of creative resistance demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making new worlds and lifeways in the small and everyday. Taking on larger political and economic forces that affect their lives and communities, each project and group of individuals featured here is focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist and Acting Assistant Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (2016), co-editor of Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan (2016) and Global Futures in East Asia (2013). Arai is completing a second book, The 3.11 Generation: Changing the Subjects of Gender, Labor and Environment in Trans-Local Japan and co-editing Ultra low birth societies in East Asia: Crisis Discourse and Collaborative Responses.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, critical development studies, and the anthropology of time. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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