Projects

CuteStudies.com | A Cute Compendium 

This website gathers and disseminates research conducted in Professor Erica Kanesaka's Cute Studies course at Emory University. Cute studies is an emergent field of inquiry that critically analyzes the power of cuteness as an aesthetic that pervades multiple facets of global culture.

For the culminating assignment in the course, students contribute original articles to the Cute Compendium, a digital resource indexing the history, culture, and politics surrounding notable cute characters, objects, animals, figures, companies, creators, texts, genres, and sub-aesthetics. 

Kawaii in Japan & Beyond: Theory & Praxis
with Joshua Paul Dale, Patrick W. Galbraith, Megan Catherine Rose, and Georgia Thomas-Parr

Kawaii is a major Japanese economic and cultural export that has drawn the attention of scholars around the world. Its diverse cultural forms, from music to art and literature, appeal to students and teachers alike. 

For this project, we have created multidisciplinary, open-access teaching resources that are diverse and accessible, including lesson plans, videos, and short essays. We aim to provide academic context and commentary within various critical theoretical frameworks, including gender and queer studies, in order to improve the higher education pedagogy on kawaii. In addition, in order to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners we have solicited content directly from members of diverse kawaii subcultures both in and outside Japan to allow them the power of self-representation.

#AtlantaSyllabus: An Asian American Studies Perspective on Anti-Asian Violence in 2021
with Lori Kido Lopez and Lisa Ho

On March 16, 2021, eight people were killed at Atlanta-area spa businesses — six of whom were Asian women. The #AtlantaSyllabus was designed for those who want to better understand this incident and this moment in all of their complexity. While Atlanta is a politically contentious space with rich legacies of Black activism, the presence of Asian Americans in the U.S. South has often been obscured in dominant narratives. Without reducing the city to this tragedy, this syllabus represents a starting point for understanding the incident in relation to Asian American history, culture, and political solidarity with Black communities. Its contents includes canonical and more recent scholarship from the academic discipline of Asian American Studies, as well as contemporary journalism, podcasts, videos, and documentaries from Asian American artists and writers.