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Karen Nakamura is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Disability Studies and Professor of Anthropology. She is a cultural and visual anthropologist whose research focuses on disability, sexuality, and minority social movements in contemporary Japan. Her first book, Deaf in Japan, was on sign language, identity, and deaf social movements. She recently finished a second book on schizophrenia and mental illness in Japan entitled, A Disability of the Soul. For the past year, she has been working on a project exploring the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality.

Media Mentions

November 15, 2020: ASL is a language (The Blue & Gray Papers) 

October 22, 2020: Community memory is essential to disability justice (The Daily Californian) 

June 24, 2020: UC Berkeley allocates space for disability cultural center in Hearst Field Annex (The Daily Californian) 

Jue 22, 2020: At SOMArts, ‘CripTech’ Hacks Tech to Dismantle Ableism (KQED) 

February 26, 2018: UC Berkeley’s Disabled Students’ Program is always working to improve (The Daily Californian) 

January 11, 2018: Inside Japan's 'suicide forest' (Lebanon Express) 

February 19, 2016: Queer Disability History with Corbett O’Toole (KPFA) 

November 17, 2015: Top disability scholar leaving Yale for Berkeley (Berkeley News) 

October 9, 2015: In conversation: Karen Nakamura on 25 years of the Americans with Disabilities Act (Yale News) 

July 15, 2014: Transgender Rights: "The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time"? (WNPR)