Wataru Kusaka – TUFS
Area Studies on Southeast Asia
Wataru Kusaka specializes in Southeast Asian area studies focusing on the Philippines, based on political science and cultural anthropology. In order to tackle various issues surrounding sustainability, it is indispensable to gain an intrinsic understanding of what is happening on the ground, how local people understand the issues surrounding them, and what meaning they give to their own actions. In the lectures and seminars, students will learn how to understand a wide range of political processes (domination, resistance, and competition over the definition of values and the allocation of resources) from “below,” based on the reality of grassroots people, through methodologies such as field research and ethnography.