Politically Excluded “Commoners”
Politically Excluded “Commoners”
A Gendered Pathway to Participation
This chapter introduces two sets of focus group participants—all women of voting age living in the Tokyo metropolitan area. These women use emphatic narratives about education, self-improvement, community, and national development when talking about electoral participation. They assume responsibility for teaching themselves and analyze their own interactions with the state in everyday life as their primary data source for evaluating national politics. Participants transform the focus group into a “community of practice” and through this process provide insight into how any study group, regardless of topic, upends traditional modes of knowledge production. Women's study groups yield alternative definitions of democracy and political practices that clash with “elite” national politics in Japan.
Keywords: focus groups, women's study groups, community of practice, knowledge production, elite national politics, alternative political practices
Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
