Each week, we listened to the department faculty take turns introducing the frontiers of civil engineering by presenting their research and wrote our reflections at the end of class. One by one all the students handed their reflections in until I was left alone with the teaching assistant, looking up all of the Japanese characters I needed to write by hand. As a master’s student at Nagoya University, I was frequently the only non-Japanese student in class. Though at the time I did not even know what “ethnography” was, my experiences in Japan drew me into a sort of accidental ethnography as I learned from different cultures but also learned what it is like to be an outsider. Now I use ethnography in my current research, and work with groups who find themselves at odds over fundamental issues, such as Taiwanese Buddhist activists who oppose hunting and the Taiwanese indigenous mountain people who rely on hunting as part of their way of life. As a researcher, I put myself in the position where I must represent multiple sides without causing harm to any. This approach forces an intellectual honesty forged by an empathic understanding of multiple perspectives.

 

When I was a member of the Duke community, I worked to bring this approach to campus. In 2015, three incidents occurred on or near Duke University’s campus: a backlash against an inclusivity initiative inviting Muslim students to perform a call to prayer at the top of Duke Chapel; a triple homicide of three Muslims affiliated with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and a noose found hanging on Duke campus. At that time, a student in a field methods course in cultural anthropology shared with me her term paper on trauma experienced by the Muslim Student Organization that semester. Some Muslim students received death threats during the backlash over the call to prayer, and many—including my classmate—feared for their safety on campus. As a graduate student, I thought the best way to take action was through my own program, the Graduate Program in Religion (GPR). I worked with graduate student representatives who invited me to write a survey for students in the GPR. My survey asked students about the degree of safety they felt on campus, how welcome they felt at Duke, and their concerns regarding the campus climate. The results of the survey were shared with the GPR’s executive committee, and since that time a survey has been conducted annually. A couple years later, I brought these issues to a new graduate student representative who then chose to represent the GPR on the Graduate and Professional Student Council, Duke’s graduate student government body. She chaired the Graduate and Professional Student Council’s Task Force on Hate and Bias, and consulted with me on drafting a resolution on hate and bias that eventually passed in the General Assembly.

 

I also apply the lessons I have learned through ethnography in the classroom. In my Religion and Leadership class at Duke Kunshan University (DKU), I presented my students with an opportunity to practice leadership through a community service project. They chose to collaborate with and help organize a group of interested students at DKU to prepare a proposal for a Women’s and Gender Center at the three-year-old university. I let them lead but served as a mentor and liaison with the upper administration, discussing early stages of the project with the Undergraduate Studies Dean, the Humanities Research Center Director, and other related administrators. Students demonstrated a need for the Women’s and Gender Center by collecting information about centers at other universities and surveying a quarter of the students and faculty at DKU. I invited interested faculty to hear the final project presentation at the end of the term to help the students further recruit faculty support to create a proposal to present to the administration. I teach students that we must first place divergent realities on equal terms in order to learn from each other’s realities, even those we find difficult to accept. In the end, we can hold on to our own way of being, but at least if we can suspend our disbelief temporarily, we open ourselves to the possibility to learn. I opened myself to this possibility many years ago as an international student in Japan. Now I encourage my students to take the risk of opening themselves to listen to the experiences that each person brings to the classroom and to the Earth that we all share.