top of page
P_20180131_160230_BF.jpg

Assistant Prof. Tina Shrestha

Member

Tina Shrestha has a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University. She is Assistant Professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS), Waseda University. Her research includes asylum legalization in North America and migration infrastructures interconnecting Southeast and East Asia. She is currently researching on the role of the Nepali state and private agencies, including language institutions and educational consultancies, facilitating migration to Japan. Her recent publication includes "Aspirational Infrastructure: Everyday brokerage and foreign-employment recruitment agencies in Nepal" (Pacific Affairs 91, 4 [2018]), and is a guest co-editor of a special issue journal “Introduction: Practices of Brokerage and the Making of Migration Infrastructures in Asia" (Pacific Affairs 91, 4 [2018] with Brenda S.A. Yeoh).

Research Projects

​​

  • 2020-2024. (Co-PI) on JSPS Kaken 令和2(2020)年度 基盤研究(B)(一般) Reconstructing the geographies by movement of people: Nepal area study beyond national borders of Nepal.”

  • JSPS Early-Career Scientists award for "Migration infrastructure and Nepali student-migration to Japan," 2019-2021, PI, brief description: The project is an ethnographically grounded approach to understanding the contemporary migration from Nepal to Japan. The focus is on the collaborative role of the state and private institutions, including educational consultancies, language institutions, and government-initiated training programs, organizing, regulating, and ultimately facilitating Nepali outmigration to Japan.

Workshops/Conferences

​​

  • 2022 “Casualties of infrastructural re-construction: Nepali student-migrants, suspended mobility, and the COVID-19 pandemic governance in Japan,” Invited workshop on “Infrastructures and Im(mobile) lives: interruptions, failures, and repairs.” Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Feb. 21-22

  • 2021 “Credibility, claimant-testimony, and the frame(s) of victimhood in the US asylum process,” Executive Session on ‘Truth, Responsibility, and Accountability in Asylum Engagements: Refugee Epistemology and Fugitive Anthropology,’ American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore, November 18- 22.

Publications

  • Shrestha, Tina. 2022.  “Educational aspirations and labor of Nepali students in Japan” [ネパール人留学生の進学希望と就労] Special Issue Chiri: Japanese Journal of Geography, March, Vol. 67.

  • Shrestha, Tina. 2022 “Nepali: outmigration and the evolving diaspora.” In Languages of Japan: Communities and Cultures. John Maher, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Shrestha, Tina. 2020. “आकांक्षिक पूर्वाधार: नेपालमा दैनिक दलाली र वैदेशिक रोजगार व्यवसायी संस्थाहरू,” Samaj Adhyayan, 14: 25-50.

  • Shrestha, Tina. 2019. [Nepali translation] “Aspirational Infrastructure: Everyday brokerage and the foreign employment-recruitment agencies in Nepal,”Samaj Adhayan, Vol. 14.

  • Shrestha, Tina. 2019. “Asylum-seeking, precariousness, and the making claimant-workers,” Anthropology of Work Review, 40 (1).

bottom of page