This term, we welcome to the Department Dr Iza Kavedžija, a social and medical anthropologist specialising in Japan. Iza's primary research interests span health and wellbeing, ageing and the life course, and art and creativity.
Dr Kavedžija’s research explores the lived experience of ageing in urban Japan, and the ways in which older people construct a meaningful and satisfying life through narrative activity and practices of care which pervade everyday sociality.
Her first monograph, Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan (based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford and published in 2019 by University of Pennsylvania Press), describes their efforts to navigate pervasive tensions between dependence and freedom, or between a rich social life and a desired level of separation in which the burdens imposed by ‘sticky’ social relationships are minimised; it argues that balancing acts of this kind are central to what it means to live well. She has also published a series of journal articles addressing a broad range of topics including care; hope and hopelessness; happiness; and gratitude, among others.
Her research on art and artists, carried out alongside her work with older people, has sought to understand the nature of artistic production and creative collaboration in contemporary Japan, and to explore art as a form of meaningful work.
Dr Kavedžija is the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded Leadership Fellowship project, entitled The Work of Art in Contemporary Japan: Inner and outer worlds of creativity. In this project, drawing on visual and sensory methodologies alongside narrative phenomenology, the aim is to understand how artists combine narrative and non-narrative resources in building both a sense of self and a distinctive understanding of the creative process.