Paper short abstract:

How do we teach trauma-informed anthropology without centering on damage? This paper considers how students reflect on lived realities of Japanese Canadians interned during World War II through a data-driven storytelling module, taught in collaboration with the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre.

Paper long abstract:

How do we teach trauma-informed anthropology in a way that does not center on damage? Since 2022, I have collaborated with the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto, Canada to develop a pedagogical module on data-driven storytelling. With photos from the JCCC’s archives, students are tasked to research an element of Japanese Canadian history, community, and/or agency, inspired from their selected picture, then to develop a multimodal ethnographic narrative that is accessible and relevant to the Japanese Canadian community. I will first begin by considering some challenges in teaching first-year anthropology students of the trauma and racism experienced by Japanese Canadians dispossessed and interned by the Canadian government during World War II. Second, I will discuss how students engage with and reflect on their conversation with Keo Shibatani, a Japanese Canadian who was displaced from his home in Vancouver, forcefully relocated to the Tashme camp in the interior of British Columbia, then displaced again to Japan after the war. This section attends to the lessons learned from this unsettling conversation on trauma, specifically the lived reality and lasting impact of dispossession. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion on the work of students’ multimodal ethnographic storytelling and how they attend to the impact of trauma by considering the agency, resilience, and futurity of Japanese Canadians. While student projects are of anthropological and academic concerns, student projects are curated and exhibited for the JCCC community thereby teaching students that their findings are used by, for, and with community (Tuck 2009).