Person

Gracia Liu-Farrer

Principal Investigator

Gracia is a Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migration at Waseda University, Japan. Her research has examined immigrants’ economic and social practices in Japan, and the mobilities of educational and labor migrants within and out of Asia. I have a particular interest in the social processes of skill construction, including how skill is conceptualized, recognized, built and utilized by different actors and how it affects individuals’ various mobility trajectories. She has authored books Labor Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants (Routledge, 2011) and Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020). She has also co-edited Handbook of Asian Migrations (with Brenda Yeoh, Routledge, 2018) and Tangled Mobilities: Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration (with Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, Berghahn Books, 2022).

As an associate member of the AspirE project, she will lead the investigation of the out-migration of Japanese nationals into Europe.