Learning to Belong in the World (PDF)

Tomoko Tokunaga is a Project Assistant Professor at the International Center, Keio University in Tokyo. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (specialization in Socio-cultural Foundations of Education) as a Fulbright Scholar from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her M.A. in Education from the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on the impact of migration on immigrant youth and their potential roles in a globalized world. She has conducted longitudinal multi-sited ethnographic research with Filipina immigrant girls in Japan and Asian American girls in the United States, focusing on notions of agency, belonging, identity, and borderlands.
More recently, she has explored the possibilities of community engagement in empowering and supporting the creation of ibasho (places where one feels a sense of comfort, safety, and acceptance) for minority youth in Japan and the United States. She was awarded the 2013 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Special Interest Group: Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans (REAPA), and the 2013 Presidential Early Career Fellowship from the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Her work has appeared in journals, including International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Ethnography and Education, and Equity & Excellence in Education.