Researchers

​Kristien Hens is professor of philosophy with a special interest in the intersection of philosophy of biology, bioethics, environmental philosophy and Japanese thought. She teaches a first bachelor course in Philosophy 'Japanese thought and the environment' at the University of Antwerp and was a visiting researcher at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) in Kyoto in autumn 2025.

Franlu Vulliermet

Roschanack Shaery-Yazdi

In both of my former research projects using qualitative methods, I highlighted the ordeals of subaltern groups in Lebanon within the context of Iranian- and Syrian-state-initiated transnational shadow networks. It is now time to lay the foundation for a new research project and focus on how ordinary citizens inside Iran have found creative ways to navigate the economic devastations of an authoritarian regime. Through the lens of the labor migration of over 80,000 subaltern Iranian men to Japan in the late 1980s, this new project allows me to elaborate my own contribution to how ordinary citizens develop uncanny strategies to counter international sanctions, postwar economic devastation, and massive state corruption. Recent edited volumes, such as Asian Migration and New Racism: Beyond Colour and the ‘West’ (Sylvia Ang et al., 2023), urge us to go beyond the white/non-white binaries and explore new forms of exclusion and racialization within inter-Asian mobility and labor migration. Beyond Euro-American paradigms, this research on Iranian labor migrants in Japan is positioned within broader debates on new modes of hierarchization in Asian capitalist markets. I follow the calls of theorists such as Kuan-Hsing Chang (2010) in his famous book Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, who urges scholars toward methodologies that treat Asia itself as a dynamic space of mutual influence and argues that Asian societies should be read in relation to one another rather than through Euro-American reference points. This research is firmly situated within these debates over inter-Asian connected histories, turning away from discussions of white supremacy that dominate discussions of racial capitalism and global labor movements. Through ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, GIS mapping, open-ended interviews, biographical and archival research, and social media analysis, I aim to research different facets of this labor movement: reconstructing their motivations, mobility, and imaginations of Japan; while with Japanese colleagues, we further investigate possible connections between workers and Japanese criminal networks and finally explore the transnational networks of their Iranian and Japanese wives and adult children to understand how gender factors in inter-Asian racial capitalism. In 2025 I received a long-term FWO mobility grant to conduct some preliminary research in Japan while in 2027 I will conduct more in-depth fieldwork in Tokyo supported by FWO Sabbatical Bench Fee. I aim to write a crossover book for a broader audience on this very short yet intense labor flow from Iran which triggered for decades to come Japan’s conservative labor migration debate.

Manon Paredis is a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp, interested in ecology, multispecies entanglement, and non-Western philosophies. Currently she is working on a project on plant ethics and Japanese philosophy.

​Kyoko Iwaki is a Tenured Associate Professor at Faculty of Arts, University of Antwerp. She is the Spokesperson for the Research Centre for Visual Poetics. She obtained a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London in November 2017. Her Ph.D. thesis titled Nuclear Catastrophes and the Theatre in Tokyo, 1945 – 2016 was supported for three years by the Goldsmiths” Bursary Scheme. After completing her Ph.D., she became a Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Until 2019, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University. Her postdoctoral fellowship was fully funded for three years by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Kyoko is recognized as a specialist in Japanese contemporary theatre and performance who conducts interdisciplinary research especially after catastrophes in the vein of post-visual theatre. This includes postcolonialism and intercultural theatre, ghosts and spirituality, affect theory, queer politics, haptic dramaturgy, and more-than-human philosophies with a strong investment in Buddhism. Kyoko’s recent publications include: “The Politics of the Senses: Takayama Akira’s Atomized Theatre after Fukushima” in Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (Routledge, 2016); “Diffracting the Politicized Spectacle: Queering Censorship in the Aichi Triennale”, Performance Research (2021); “On (Not) Being Useful: The Art of Drifting in Asian Contemporary Theatre”, Studies in Theatre and Performance (2021); and “The Delegated Performance of the Dead: Performing in Post-Fukushima Phantom Reality,” The Paper Bridge: Contemporary Intersections of Japanese-Western Theatre (Poznan University Press, 2022). She is also the Associate Editor of Performance Research journal. Before entering academia, Kyoko worked for ten years as a theatre critic contributing to media outlets such as Asahi Newspaper. As a bilingual journalist who grew up in New York, she has interviewed over a thousand artists on various theatre and performance productions in twenty-nine countries. As a Japanese theatre specialist, she has been invited to give lectures and talks at various venues also outside academia including, Japan Foundation London, Weiwuying Arts Festival Taiwan, and LIFT Festival London. Within the academic framework, she has given lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, Waseda University, Chuō University, Rikkyō University, Meiji University, Tokyo University and at The Graduate Centre, City University of New York. Kyoko also works occasionally as a dramaturg and programmer. She was appointed the first non-European co-programmer for Theater der Welt festival in 2023 (Frankfurt-Offenbach). In 2022, the edited joint issue for JDTC (Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism) and GPS (Global Performance Studies) has been recognized with an Honourable Mention for the 2022 Editing Award by the Association of Theatre in Higher Education. Kyoko was also awarded the 2026 Carol Fischer Sorgenfrei Award for Japanese Theatre Scholarship from The Association for Asian Performance, for her journal article “Akira Takayama’s McDonald’s Radio University: Brechtian Listening in McDonald’s and Postvisual Dramaturgy,” TDR: The Drama Review 69:4.

Luca Domenico Artuso (he/him) is a PhD researcher in Theatre and Intermediality at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He holds an MA in Japanese Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, specializing in Noh Theatre and Japanese Early Modern Paleography. He has served as specialist librarian at the Japan Foundation Library in Rome from 2019-2023. His current doctoral project, More-than-Human Japanese Dramaturgies and Their Performative Ends, adopts a feminist and gender studies approach to the analysis of Noh theatre and contemporary Japanese performance. He has been training in Noh since 2017, whenever he has the opportunity to return to Japan.

​Ilja Van Damme​