Jamie Coates

I am an anthropologist who joined Sheffield permanently in 2018 after having previously worked at Sheffield, Waseda University, Osaka University and Sophia University. I completed my PhD in anthropology at the Australian National University, where my dissertation focused on an emergent Chinatown in central Tokyo.

I have lived in Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo, and Kyoto, spending most of my twenties and early thirties in East Asia.

I was a China Scholarship Council student at Beijing Language and Culture University, an English teacher in Taiwan, a Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) research scholar at Sophia University, and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellow at Waseda University.

I also previously worked as a research assistant in psychiatric epidemiology in Australia.

In the School of East Asian Studies I teach across both the undergraduate and graduate programmes.

I specialise in the cultural anthropology of China and Japan, but enjoy collaborations across fields as diverse as literary, film and media studies, geography, history, psychology, sociology and international relations.

I combine visual and digital ethnography with historical and textual analysis to explore the relationship between technology, mobility and imagination in urban Northeast Asia.

Broadly speaking, I am interested in how different ways of living, and different modes of thinking, foster or inhibit humanity’s capacity to cooperate. In short, I am fascinated by how people manage to get along.

Rather than focusing on the formal and intergovernmental level of this line of questioning, I concentrate on the informal, local and interpersonal scales of this problem.

East Asia serves as an inspiring site for thinking about these questions because of the fraught histories it shares and the increasingly entangled nature of contemporary flows of people, products and popular culture in the region.

Building on my doctoral research on Chinese migration to Japan, I am currently investigating how media and migration re-scale local imaginaries in the Sino-Japanese context.

Focusing on forms of play, consumption, and media use among Chinese people living in Japan I ask how quotidian phenomena such as transport, food, tourism, games, gender and sex are changing the way interpersonal Chinese relations and Sino-Japanese relations are imagined in the current era.

Through this interest, I am increasingly engaging with wider question of how digital technologies are changing relationships and personhood in East Asia, as well as how digital East Asia challenges current debates in the social sciences and humanities.