Social Sciences | Interview with Prof. Dr. Jill Koyama
Name: Prof. Dr. Jill Koyama
Affiliation: Division of Educational Leadership & Innovation, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Farmer Education Bldg. #402N, Arizona State University, 1050 S Forest Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA
Interests: refugee/(im)migrant education; ethnography; anthropology of education; critical education policy; actor-network theory
1st Edition: Special Issue: Teaching and Learning in Refugee and Migrant Communities Worldwide
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci/special_issues/64ADQHG1S0
2nd Edition: Call for Papers: "Policy and Policing: The Governance of Refugee and Migrant Education in an Age of Hostility – Second Edition"
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci/special_issues/YF7WWQ7Z91
The following is a short interview with Prof. Dr. Jill Koyama:
1. Can you share how your academic journey began and what inspired you to pursue your current field of research?
Thank you for this opportunity to talk about it. My main research areas are refugees, immigrants, education, and policy, and I think several things in my life brought me to this particular intellectual curiosity. Part of it is just my upbringing. I come from an immigrant family, and my Japanese family—part of them—were interned during the war, and I always knew that people could be treated differently and have different experiences based on language, ethnicity, and nationality. So that was always present in my thinking, but maybe not always active when I was younger.
And then I was really fortunate to work at a community college with refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam. That was my first real long-term engagement with refugees, and I realized how different they were and their experiences were from other types of migrants. I think that was my first introduction, and then after that, I just found myself seeking out ways to learn more about people who came from other places. So I think it has been a circuitous path; it wasn’t very linear. I came into academia later than most of my colleagues, and didn't go to get my doctorate until my mid-to-late 30s.
2. What emerging trends or frontiers in your field do you believe hold the most promise for advancing the area?
I think it’s quite an interesting area of scholarship, and part of doing the Special Issue was my excitement in reading some of this new scholarship. But I think two areas interest me most, or I think are most promising to change. One is the policy area; a lot more people are looking at global policy and challenging some of the assumptions about refugees and the way that they're positioned there. Many people are looking at state- and local-level policies, and so I think critical policy research can be quite potentially transformative.
The other part is looking at what refugees themselves are doing. We often look at institutions and education, but what are the refugees doing? They're doing all kinds of things despite all the challenges we put in front of them, and I think that's interesting to learn from them what they're doing. They're creating entire resource networks, they are starting businesses, they are creating day cares and after-school programs, and all kinds of things that are very community and culturally relevant and culturally based. I think that's exciting and that we could learn from them; governments could learn from that.
3. Could you share any memorable experiences or lessons learned from publishing in journals or collaborating on edited volumes?
Sure. I think you know I am near the end of my career, which is great, but I think that I’m still learning, right? I am also an editor of another journal, Anthropology and Education Quarterly Journal, and I have learned a lot about publishing as an entity: everything from buying a DOI to how our archives are kept; publishing is not just a journal. That Special Issue that you see, there are so many people and so much behind that. Revealing that process to me has been interesting, and it's made me appreciate more the way in which we're able to distribute knowledge and share it. I also think that—I joke that many Special Issues, even ones that I have worked on, are not so special, and yet what is so special about these? But then some are.
I had that experience working with Social Sciences that I wasn’t exactly sure about. You learn, you're not sure what it's going to look like. You have an idea, but you don't know what manuscripts you're going to get. You don't know who's going to contribute, and then when you start to get them and you see them completely in conversation with each other, it ends up being something much bigger. I think as a Special Issue, I feel it’s a great surprise and it's a wonderful, wonderful gift.
So I think that there's potential to learn, always to learn in publishing. I don't know what the future of publishing is. Will we have journals as we know them? We certainly don't have very many hard-copy journals anymore. Papers are published as they're accepted. It's really interesting to me the way that shifting our access to knowledge and the way that we distribute it. I do like Open Access online, I think that takes away some of the hierarchy of who gets access and who doesn't, and I think that there are opportunities to learn in every part. I like international collaborations like Social Sciences much more, because if not, we're just talking to each other; we know each other and we're just talking to each other, and that is useful for us, but not for the useful for the world.
4. What’s your cooperation experience with Social Sciences? You edited two Special Issue editions? What can you share with us about the process?
I admit I didn’t know much about Social Sciences when I was first approached. I went through and did some reading of articles and everything, and I found them to be really quite diverse, which was nice. I mean voices that I hadn't known, scholars I hadn't known, from very emergent, beginning scholars to those who are quite well known in the field. I like that mix, and I thought, “Well, I would like to do this.” I didn't know what it the Special Issue was going to look like or how the process would work, but it is probably the most streamlined, efficient process from submission to review that I've ever worked in. I was so surprised. The staff, thankfully, would have to nudge me, “there's a manuscript sitting there”, and they were constantly in communication with me. There was one piece in particular that showed the integrity of the staff. The reviews were quite mixed, and there was some ethical concern; we went back and forth maybe four times in conversation, and, to their good credit, they were very open about what I had to say and what the author had to say. In the end, the author changed a few things, and then we were able to publish it. I think it would have been easier for them, probably to just say “no, we're not gonna publish this”, and I never felt any tension in that process. Even when I didn't agree with the reviewers, it was like colleagues who just had different opinions, and that was a productive and good experience for me. That isn't always the case with other publishers; often you just get a rejection or you get these reviews and there's no synthesis of them, and then that's it and you either change things, you revise it, or you don't.
And I didn't find it was this way with Social Sciences. The authors also commented that they would revise; another group of authors had to go back and forth on a few things, and each time their changes were deeply considered. I thought that was a good model, a good process. The reviews are also quick. As the special Guest Editor, I had a lot of control over the Special Issue, for example, picking reviewers or not picking reviewers—sometimes I would defer the task to the staff. And sometimes I would choose, and I just thought, “OK, that's great.”
It didn't have to be either/or, and I got to look at a piece two to four times, which I also don't think is very common. So I had a really good experience. I was thrilled when they asked if I wanted to do a second one, more focused on policy.
5. As an experienced scholar, what advice would you give to early career researchers in your field and the social sciences navigating today’s academic landscape/scenarios?
The good thing is that you said “scenarios”, plural, because it's just a changing landscape, right? Right now, in the US, in this context, higher education is under great assault. I would love for junior scholars and emerging scholars to be just bolder than I was. I was trained very classically, very traditionally in some ways, in anthropology, and I learnt very early on how to write a journal article, and it was kind of a formula; you knew the parts that would need to be included, and I wrote that way for quite some time, and it was only later where I was able to push some of that. I see junior scholars doing that more, pushing back against theory, pushing back a great deal, thankfully, on the very colonial type of thinking, going beyond qualitative methods and bringing in more feminist theories, queer theories, and critical race theory. They are blending them in ways that I don’t think I would have been brave enough to do; I wouldn't have felt like I knew what I was saying. I still don't think I sometimes know what I'm saying, and so I encourage them, but I also encourage them to just also respect the history and respect the scholarship. So yes, you can push back, you can move beyond, you can extend, you can critique, but also still acknowledge. I think sometimes that gets lost. Social sciences is one of the places where I think it doesn't get lost as much as other fields. I do think in psychology and anthropology, they are still there, there, like our totemic ancestors, and we still reference them. Even if we critique them.
I would encourage junior faculty to keep doing that. And then think about different ways of expressing our knowledge. I love visual anthropology, and I love creative submissions. I don't do that, but I have seen great works. A friend does comics; she creates comics. I think there are a lot of ways of showing our research that isn't always an article, but it can be an article plus, maybe plus a video, plus a film, plus something.
6. Looking ahead, what research questions or methodological innovations do you think will define the next decade in your field?
Well, I don’t know. I'll give you the anthropology answer. This is the anthropology answer: it depends.
It's like the default. It depends. I hope there will be fewer people in academia leading the research in my field and many more refugees and migrants and community organizations saying “we need to know this”, “can you come help design the study?”, instead of us saying “we'd like to know more about you”. This way, I hope, will lead to a greater collaboration. Some people might call it participatory action. But something that is driven by the communities and people that it will mostly affect, that's what I'd like to see. I can't even imagine some of the research that's going to be done because I think about AI and enhanced learning, and some of that, which I find exciting. I don't use it very much, and that's another thing. Social Sciences was the only one that ever asked me if I used AI in any way. I think that’s a good question; I thought everyone should ask that, right? It's not bad, but we should all be talking about that, like “here's the way I used it.” I think that will become more prevalent. I can only imagine doing all kinds of research where you're not actually at the place, maybe not in the country, which would be odd for me as an ethnographer, it would be odd not to go.
But I can imagine that happening. And I know in our country, for the foreseeable future, there'll be less government-sponsored research. So, who's going to sponsor this research, and what is going to be their commitment and ethical concern, and will there be financial gain? I think those are all questions that we're going to be grappling with as governments step back from their support of research.