Shawn Bender – författare

With its thunderous sounds and dazzling choreography, Japanese taiko drumming has captivated audiences in Japan and across the world, making it one of the most successful performing arts to emerge from Japan in the past century. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among taiko groups in Japan, "Taiko Boom" explores the origins of taiko in the early postwar period and its popularization over the following decades of rapid economic growth in Japan's cities and countryside. Building on the insights of globalization studies, the book argues that taiko developed within and has come to express new forms of communal association in a Japan increasingly engaged with global cultural flows. While its popularity has created new opportunities for Japanese to participate in community life, this study also reveals how the discourses and practices of taiko drummers dramatize tensions inherent in Japanese conceptions of race, the body, gender, authenticity, and locality.

With its thunderous sounds and dazzling choreography, Japanese taiko drumming has captivated audiences in Japan and across the world, making it one of the most successful performing arts to emerge from Japan in the past century. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among taiko groups in Japan, "Taiko Boom" explores the origins of taiko in the early postwar period and its popularization over the following decades of rapid economic growth in Japan's cities and countryside. Building on the insights of globalization studies, the book argues that taiko developed within and has come to express new forms of communal association in a Japan increasingly engaged with global cultural flows. While its popularity has created new opportunities for Japanese to participate in community life, this study also reveals how the discourses and practices of taiko drummers dramatize tensions inherent in Japanese conceptions of race, the body, gender, authenticity, and locality.

In recent years, debates over healthcare have accompanied rapid advances in technology, from the expansion of telehealth services to artificial intelligence driven diagnostics. In this book, Shawn Bender delves into the world of Japanese robots engineered for care. Care robots (kaigo robotto) emerged early in the 21st century, when roboticists began converting assembly line technologies into responsive machines for older adults and people with disabilities. These robots are meant to be felt and programmed to feel. While some greet them with enthusiasm, others fear that they might replace a fundamentally human task. Based on fieldwork in Japan, Denmark, and Germany, Bender traces the emergence of care robots in Japan and examines their impact on therapeutic practice around the world.Social science scholarship on robotics tends to be either speculative—imagining life together with robots—or experimental—observing robot-human interaction in laboratories or through short-term field studies. Instead, Bender follows roboticists developing technologies in Japan, and travels with the robots themselves into everyday sites of care, tracking the integration of robots into institutional care and the connection of care practice to robotics development. By exploring the application of Japanese robotics across the globe, Feeling Machines highlights the entanglements of therapeutic practice and technological innovation in an age of more-than-human care.