Concept Development Team

Andrea Boccardi, Ph.D., is a scholar of Japanophone media whose work examines Okinawan storytelling and minority representations in media. His research explores the depiction of the relationship between the human and the extra-human in Okinawan narratives, focusing on picture books to investigate how local literary narratives employ Indigenous epistemology as a form of political activism and ecocriticism.

Daniel E. Josephy-Hernández holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is Adjunct Professor at Ryūtsū Keizai Daigaku, Japan and at Dokkyō University, Japan; and Associate Professor at UNED, Costa Rica. His research focus is gender and audiovisual translation, as well as anime: its distribution, censorship, dialect translation, and yakuwarigo. His current research concentrates on Japanese Pop Culture in Latin America and is editing a collection on the topic.

Akino Oshiro, Ph.D. (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, 2025), is a scholar of modern Japan and East Asia whose work examines the intersections of empire, militarization, and social movements. Her research explores how communities respond to and resist military and colonial infrastructures, with a focus on Okinawa and transregional connections in East Asia, such as Jeju in South Korea. Her publications investigate the lived experiences of the groups and the politics of space, labor, and security.

Stephanie Santschi, Ph.D., investigates how images create and communicate knowledge, with a focus on Japanese print culture, digital methodologies, and participatory infrastructures for visual research. Her dissertation (University of Zurich, 2023) examined Hokusai's early painting manuals. Currently, she builds citizen science platforms for spatial analysis of historical images and develops pedagogical frameworks for computational technologies integration in humanities education.