Ayumi Inouchi
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Mail code: 0202Campus: Tempe
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Ayumi Inouchi is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist of contemporary Japan and Indonesia, focusing on how language practice, daily aesthetics, and cultural production of young women give rise to emergent negotiation of social relations and ideologies, particularly around gender.
Her current book project, Seeking Ambiguity: Korean Language Use among Japanese High School Girls in Contemporary Japan, examines the cultural-semiotic processes through which the social meanings of the Korean language, as well as the perception of South Korea, have been shifting among Japanese young women. In her second project, she is examining the craft-making and art market boom among young female K-pop fans in urban Indonesia as a site of women-led Asian transnationalism, rising post-feminist sensibility, and creative labor in neoliberalizing contemporary Indonesia.
Her projects have been supported by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Kajima Foundation, and the Global Asia Initiative at Pennsylvania State University. Her work has appeared in Signs and Society, Intercultural Education, Studies of Language and Cultural Education, and Japanese Journal of Language in Society, among others. She is also a co-author of Starting Your Research in Discourse Studies: A Guidebook for Students, a textbook for discourse analysis.
- Contemporary Japan and Indonesia
- Language, identity, and ideology
- Gender and sexuality
- Girl culture and its aesthetics/politics
- Postfeminist media culture
- Youth and language education
- Anthropology of value
Research Affiliations/Groups
- 2021–2022 Visiting Fellow, Harvard-Yenching Institute
- 2023–2025 Selected Participant, Cultivating Early Career Networks Between Global Asias and Japanese Studies, Global Asias Initiative (GAI), Pennsylvania State University
- 2024–2026 International Joint Research Group on the Consumption of Japanese Culture in Indonesia and Malaysian Youth Culture, The Kajima Foundation
- 2026 Selected Participant, The ARI-Luce Collaboratory, Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
- “Koreaish: Aesthetics, Qualia, and Sensory Emergence of Korea among Japanese Young Women,” Signs and Society, Vol. 14, No. 2 (February 2026). https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2025.10043
- “コロナ禍初期における大学生のオンライン雑談会話[Online Casual Conversations among University Students in the Early Days of the Pandemic]” (Co-authored with Haruka Sakai), in Japanese, Japanese Journal of Language in Society, Vol. 25, No. 1 (October 2022): 102–117. https://doi.org/10.19024/jajls.25.1_102
- “「わたしたちのことば」に創発する居場所―留学生の逸脱的日本語によるあそびの分析から― [The Emergence of Ibasho in “Our Language”: Joking Practices with Deviant Japanese and Social Identities of International Students],” in Japanese, Intercultural Education, Vol. 55, (March 2022): 176–193. *Best Paper Award FY 2020-2021 from Intercultural Education Society of Japan
- “保育園と外国人保護者のコミュニケーション―ことばを問い,フィールドとかかわる言語人類学的実践研究 [Communication Issues between Preschool Staff and Foreign Parents: From the perspective of linguistic anthropology]” (Co-authored with Risako Ide), in Japanese, Studies of Language and Cultural Education, Vol. 18 (December 2020): 61–81. https://doi.org/10.14960/gbkkg.18.61
Co-Authored Book:
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ディスコース研究のはじめかた―問いの見つけ方から論文執筆まで― [Starting Your Research in Discourse Studies: A guidebook for students] (with Risako Ide, Toshiyuki Aoyama, Yuko Kano, and Yeming Chu, Tokyo: Hitsuji, February 2025)
Chapters in Edited Volumes:
- “ソーシャルメディアを活用したミニエスノグラフィー:インドネシアのファンアートの事例から [Ethnography with Social Media: A Study of Fan Art Making in Indonesia],” in Japanese, in ミニエスノグラフィーの実践 [Practice of Mini-Ethnography], ed. Toshiaki Hara (Tokyo: Nakanishiya Publishing, forthcoming 2026).
- “Voicing the Belonging: Joking practices with deviant Japanese among international students at a Japanese university,” in Navigating Friendships in Interaction: Discursive and Ethnographic Perspectives, eds. Bushnell Cade and Moody Stephen (London: Routledge, December 2023), 101–119. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003381426
Book Reviews:
- "Linguistic Anthropology of Education and Transnational Mobility by Satoko Shao-Kobayashi (2021)," New Frontiers in Asian Scholarship Book Review Series, Harvard-Yenching Institute, May 12, 2022. http://ow.ly/4GV550NqwwK
- "Can Japanese Language Communicate Closeness? by Masato Takiura (2013)," New Frontiers in Asian Scholarship Book Review Series, Harvard-Yenching Institute, January 20, 2022. http://ow.ly/NFVt50HE4g3
Dissertation:
"Seeking Ambiguity: Korean Language Use among Japanese High School Girls in Contemporary Japan" (PhD dissertation, University of Tsukuba, 2024)
Courses
2026 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| JPN 401 | Reading Modern Japanese Texts |
2026 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| SLC 421 | Japanese Lit in Translation |
| JPN 421 | Japanese Lit in Translation |
| SLC 598 | Special Topics |
2025 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| JPN 401 | Reading Modern Japanese Texts |
- 2023 IESJ Best Paper Award (FY 2020–2021), International Education Society of Japan
- 2023 AAS Annual Meeting Grant, Harvard-Yenching Institute
- 2022 Outstanding Presentation Award at the 42nd Meeting of the International Education Society of Japan, International Education Society of Japan
- 2021–2022 Visiting Fellowship, Harvard-Yenching Institute