7 - Yuko Aoyama: Curiosity as Method

Summary

Introduction

When reading through Yuko Aoyama's publications in preparing this chapter, I was reminded of what a rare luxury it is to study someone's scholarship in its entirety. Our purpose for reading affects how we do it, and as academics, we often review our colleagues’ writings with the aim of identifying their relevance to our own scholarly endeavours. As we cite other researchers to express how our insights build on their works, we simultaneously recirculate their intellectual contributions and validate them as relevant disciplinary knowledge. Quoting and referencing are central to academic research, and recent debates about gender and racial inequalities within the academy have drawn much-needed attention to how citation practices suppress or promote diversity. Awareness of who we read, cite and assign to our syllabi should be extended to include attentiveness to who is given the opportunity to consolidate their status through public appraisals of their entire scholarship. Academia provides occasions to publicly appraise professional careers while people are still alive and productive, for example through introductions to keynote speeches, award announcements, and honorary title ceremonies. Such events reveal how the scholar's ideas have evolved and how their intellectual and personal lives intersect. Invitations and honorifics matter, not just as endorsements but also as occasions to convey broader academic projects and appreciate intellectual contributions beyond how they prove applicable to a task we have at hand.

A review of Aoyama's body of research from the mid-1990s until today, the early 2020s, brings out themes that are less noticeable in the texts individually: a comparative lens, a strong commitment to understanding both large trends and minutiae in context, the straddling between economic geography and other disciplinary perspectives, and linguistic and disciplinary diversity in the source material. A chronological reading of Aoyama’s work takes us from the US to Japan, Germany, Spain and India. It spans as widely thematically as it does geographically. In the early 1990s, she addressed traditional core questions in economic geography, concerning, for example, the nature of globalization, shifts toward a post-industrial society, and firm location strategies. She then ventured into territories that were less commonly explored by economic geographers at the time, including e-commerce, video games and cultural tourism.