Ayaka Yoshimizu is Assistant Professor of Teaching at the Department of Asian Studies. She also teaches and coordinates Arts courses for the UBC-Ritsumeikan Exchange Programs. Ayaka teaches courses on Japanese literature, films, media, audiovisual translation, and transpacific histories and cultures. She is a Green College Leading Scholar in 2021-23.

Courses taught and coordinated at UBC include:
ASIA 254: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Japanese Literature and Films
ASIA 354: Introduction to Japanese Cinema
ASIA 463: Japanese Documentary Media
JAPN 465: Japanese Media and Translation
ASTU 201 & 202: Canada, Japan and the Pacific
CDST 250: Introduction to Canada

Areas of Disciplinary Research:
Transpacific media and cultures; (forced) migration; cultural memory; sensory studies; performance ethnography

Areas of Pedagogical Research and Projects:
Decolonial and anti-racist approaches to teaching, curriculum development, and international education; embodied narrative as pedagogy; audio-visual translation as translingual & transcultural pedagogy

Book:

Doing Ethnography in the Wake of the Displacement of Transnational Sex Workers in Yokohama: Sensuous Remembering. Routledge, 2021.

Journal Articles:

“Student-centered, ‘Embodied Inter-referencing’ as Antiracist and Anticolonial Pedagogy.” Asia Pacific Education Review, 2022.

“Unsettling Memories of Japanese Sex Workers: Carceral Mobilities of the Transpacific Underground at the Turn of the 20th Century.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 43, 2021: 24-43.

“Doing Performance Ethnography among the Dead, Remembering Lives of Japanese Migrants in Transpacific Sex Trade.” Performance Matters 4(3), 2018: 137-154.

Co-author, with Julia Aoki, “Walking Histories, Un/making Places: Walking Tours as Ethnography of Place.” Space & Culture 18(3), 2015: 273-284.

“Bodies That Remember: Gleaning Scenic Fragments of A Brothel District in Yokohama.” Cultural Studies, 29(3), 2014: 450-475.

“Nanay: Drawing a New Landscape of Diasporic Mothers.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 27, 2012: 153-172.

“Chopsticks, Phone-Bells and Farms: Fuyuko Taira’s Diasporic Spatial Practice.” Gender, Place, and Culture, 19(3), 2012: 313-326.

“‘Hello, War Brides’: Heteroglossia, Counter-Memory, Auto/biographical Work of Japanese War Brides.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 10(1), 2010: 111-136.

Book Chapters

Hoshi, Saori & Yoshimizu, Ayaka. “Promoting Translingual and Transcultural Literacies in a Collaborative Content-Based Japanese Classroom: Audiovisual Translation as Pedagogy.” A Transdisciplinary Approach to Chinese and Japanese Language Teaching. Routledge, 2023.

“Sex Workers, Waitresses, and Wives: The Disciplining of Women’s Bodies in the Tairiku Nippo (1908-1920).” In Digital Meijis: Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150. Vancouver, BC: BCcampus, 2018. 

Aoki, Julia & Yoshimizu, Ayaka. “Walking, Sensing and Making Places: A Reflection on Ethnography of Walking in Yokohama and Vancouver.” Communication, culture, and making meaning in the city: Ethnographic engagements in urban environments (pp.111-125). Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.

“Bodies That Remember: Gleaning Scenic Fragments of A Brothel District in Yokohama.” In Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017. [Reprinted from Cultural Studies]

“‘Affective Foreigners Save Our Elder Citizens’: Media Discourse of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Japan.” In The Political Economy of Affects and Emotions in East Asia (pp.137-153). London; New York: Routledge, 2014.

Open Educational Resource

Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground

Innovative and Inclusive Teaching of UBC Instructors with Disabilities: Compiling and Sharing Existing Knowledge and Best Practices

Project Outcomes:

• Annotated Bibliography on Teaching and Learning with Disabilities and Illnesses in Higher Education
• UBC’s Accessibility and Support for Disabled Instructors Survey 2021
• Challenges and Best Practices of Disabled Instructors at UBC
• CTLT Winter Institute Workshop, What Would an Accessible University Look Like? Perspectives of Disabled Instructors at UBC
• CTLT Spring Institute Workshop, The Return to Campus and Accessibility: Perspectives of Disabled Instructors