Paul Christensen Book Talk - "Fraught Futures: Hope, Connection, and the Unhoused across Tokyo"

Event details Date: Monday, September 14, 2026 Time: 12:00 AM Type: Lecture / Talk / Workshop Campus: University Park Campus Department: Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture About this event What future are we asked to anticipate? How do such acts of collective waiting shape expectations of the contemporary? Who is erased in future renderings as a means of status quo preservation? Fraught Futures considers how officially disseminated programs concerning the direction of Japan’s future, promoted by the national government and aligned organizations, are antagonistic to the work of advocacy groups aiding Tokyo’s unhoused and hungry populations. In doing so, these programs sustain a persistent occlusion by official forces of any emancipatory or dignity-affirming transformation to the social order. As a nation often framed through assertions of superficial contradiction, highly technical yet steeped in historical reverence, Japan offers an ideal site for examining how challenges to the prevailing market-based order are stifled. By offering increasingly elaborate and improbable techno-utopian depictions of the Tokyo, Japan, and the world to come, official entities thwart sustained efforts at even limited forms of social transformation. Ultimately, Fraught Futures argues that officially promulgated visions of the future should be approached critically, as deceptive efforts to undermine attempts to actualize a collective future freed from the oppressive strictures of market-driven isolation and authoritarian austerity. Author biography: Paul Christensen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in the United States. His current work examines the struggles of unhoused individuals and people confronting designations of addiction, particularly in Tokyo. This research forms part of a broader theoretical and ethnographic orientation, grounded in Japan, that seeks to illuminate how the absurdities of austerity-driven capitalism, and its numerous harmful manifestations, shape daily life. The result of this work is his second book, Fraught Futures: Hope, Connection, and the Unhoused across Tokyo, under contract with Cornell University Press and scheduled for publication in March 2027. Official event details: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/paul-christensen-book-talk-fraught-futures-hope-connection-and-the-unhoused-across-tokyo