Hirotoshi Yoshioka

My name is Hiro Yoshioka and I’m originally from Japan. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and demography and also, Mellon Fellow in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. My research interests include international migration, infant and child mortality, and ethnic relations in Central America.

At the summer school, I hope that I can work on a project that will be a core part of my Ph.D. dissertation. I am interested in learning how people’s images of particular ethnic groups are constructed and re-constructed.Having done fieldwork in Bilwi, a city located in the Atlantic Autonomous Region of Nicaragua (RAAN) and currently living in a Guatemalan indigenous K’ichee’ community, I have some ideas of how ethnic images are constructed (e.g., using such social concepts as Charles Tilly’s social boundary, Mark Granovetter’s threshold and weak ties, and Fararo and Kosaka’s social stratification images), but these ideas are still premature. I hope that at the summer school, I can learn a lot more complex adaptive systems and ways to implement my ideas in computational simulations to better understand the concept of ethnicity.

When I’m not working, I like reading, swimming and running. I’m hoping that I will be able to enjoy the beautiful city of Santa Fe during morning runs. My email address is: oxlajuj.payaska-at-gmail.com. I look forward to meeting you all in June.

Update--- Answers to Dan Rockmore's questions:

1. I'm interested in two of demography's main areas: migration and mortality. In addition, my interests include such issues as urbanization, ethnic inequalities, and quantitative methods (in sociology and demography), especially, Bayesian statistics and non-linear multivariate decomposition (which Dan Powers at UT Austin and I are writing programs for Stata).

2. As a grad student in sociology/demography, I am familiar with theories from these two fields. And I am familiar with applied statistical modeling, and some statistical packages/languages such as R and Stata.

3. Besides learning about the complex adaptive systems approach, I would like to know what other people are doing using this approach, especially works done by social science folks.

4. As mentioned above, my hope is to work on models of identity construction. But I'm not sure if this is a feasible school project.