Vivian Shaw is a sociologist and feminist ethnographer who specializes in Asian American Studies and global-comparative Asian Studies. From 2021-2024 she was the Mellon Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where she was also the inaugural hire for the newly established program in Asian American and Asian Diaspora (AAAD) Studies. She is the Lead Researcher (co-PI) for the AAPI COVID-19 Project, a multi-method investigation into the impacts of the pandemic on the lives of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, in collaboration with the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Vivian earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin with graduate portfolios in Asian American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. At Harvard University, Vivian was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center for International Relations’ Program on U.S.-Japan Relations from 2018-2019 and a College Fellow in the Department of Sociology from 2019-2021.

Vivian is the author of several articles and chapters, including “Strategies of Ambivalence: Cultures of Liberal Antifa in Japan,” in Radical History Review, “‘Extreme Pressure’: Gendered Negotiations of Violence and Vulnerability in Japanese Anti-Racism Movements,” in Critical Asian Studies (2019), and “‘We Are Already Living Together’: Race, Collective Struggle, and the Reawakened Nation in Post-3/11 Japan” in Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (2017, Rowman & Littlefield), among other pieces. Vivian’s research has received grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (jointly awarded by the Social Science Research Council), the Natural Hazards Center, and other institutions.

Vivian’s interests are in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, and culture, focusing especially on these issues in relation to disasters, the environment, human rights, and social movements. Prior to her time in academia, Vivian worked with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in maternal-child health policy and program administration.

Book project

Anti-Racism After Disaster: Fukushima and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Activism

On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude underseas earthquake occurred off the shores of Northeast Japan, triggering a tsunami that eventually flooded the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and caused multiple reactor meltdowns. Alongside material damages, the disaster, commonly referred to simply as “Fukushima,” catalyzed significant political and cultural unrest, transforming “regular people” into activists. In the decade since, numerous scholars have analyzed the rise of anti-nuclear protests, yet their focus has tended to overlook how activists also understood Fukushima as a starting point for engaging with broader questions of inequality, violence, and exclusion in Japan. My book, Anti-Racism After Disaster: Fukushima and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Activism (tentative title), intervenes in this omission by tracing how the Fukushima nuclear disaster primed activists to politically engage with racism and social inequality, culminating in their development of a nationwide anti-racist movement against hate speech and ultra-right nationalism. The basis of this book is thirty-six months of ethnographic research, which I conducted between 2014 and 2018 in the cities of Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Osaka. Drawing from environmental sociology, global-comparative Asian studies, social movements studies, and feminist studies, Anti-Racism After Disaster explores how Japanese activists used the lens of disasters to reconceptualize the social conditions of living in Japan and the meanings of participating in politics as citizens.