Starting in the 2020-21 academic year, the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (JPOSS) was launched as an inter-university initiative by Amy Catalinac (NYU), Charles Crabtree (Dartmouth), Christina Davis (Harvard), Shinju Fujihira (Harvard), Yusaku Horiuchi (Dartmouth), Phillip Lipscy (University of Toronto), and Dan Smith (Columbia). The goals of JPOSS have been to: (1) promote discussion of works-in-progress, especially for early career stage scholars; (2) invite political scientists who do not specialize on Japan to serve as discussants and engage them with theories and evidence discussed in the Japanese political context; and (3) promote networking among scholars at different career stages, as well as those based in different countries and world regions.
JPOSS has become a model of online workshops for other subfields of political science. Over the past three years, over 100 scholars have participated as paper presenters and discussants.
In June 2022, the organizers published an article, “Workshops without Borders: Building an Online Community of Japan Scholars,” Political Science and Politics, Vol. 55, Issue 3 (2022), to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of building a global online community of political scientists with shared interests. JPOSS has also sponsored three sessions for professionalization of political science scholars dedicated to the study of Japan.
Prior to 2020, the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations co-sponsored the Contemporary Japanese Politics Study Group with the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, which met regularly in-person.
For more information on JPOSS, please consult its website, or email us at: usjapan [at] wcfia.harvard.edu.