Lieba Faier
Lieba Faier
Professor
Ladder Faculty
Office: 1255 BUNCHE HALL
Email: lfaier@geog.ucla.edu
Phone: 3108253525
Biography
I am an ethnographer whose research explores the relationships between transnational political economic processes and the making of lives, communities, and landscapes. My major research projects have involved ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, the Philippines, and the United States. I have worked on themes of transnational labor migration, human trafficking and global governance, and the international trade in forestry products. Threading through these topics is my interest in how everyday encounters shape landscapes and the lives of beings that inhabit them, both human and otherwise. My work, if grounded in questions central to cultural geography, is multidisciplinary, drawing broadly from across human and physical geography as well as from feminist studies, cultural anthropology, queer theory, science and technological studies, environmental studies, migration studies, critical race theory, indigenous studies, and international legal studies. I bring to all my research and teaching a commitment to understanding how intersecting axes of difference—gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, religion, geography, and able-bodiedness—shape cultural and spatial processes. My primary appointment at UCLA is in Geography, but I also hold a courtesy appointment in Gender Studies and serve on the advisory committees for the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and the Center for the Study of Women (CSW).
Education
Ph.D. Anthropology (Women’s Studies), University of California, Santa Cruz, 2003
M.A. Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996
B.A. World Arts and Cultures (Anthropology), University of California, Los Angeles, 1993
Research
Here, in no particular order, are some short descriptions of my major research projects and interests:
A. Human Trafficking and Global Governance: The Banality of Good
My ethnographic monograph, The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), asks why contemporary global efforts to fight human trafficking fall so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite having dedicated considerable resources to achieving them. The book answers this question by examining the inadequacies of the UN-sponsored global counter-human trafficking campaign as it has been enacted through recent efforts to fight human trafficking to Japan. I argue for attention to the banality of good that laces these efforts. I use this expression to refer to the perils of the campaign’s globalized institutional approach, which ultimately privileges technical prescription and bureaucratic convention over the needs and perspectives of those it means to assist. The book shows that as the intent to address human suffering meets the bureaucratic scale-making practices of global governance, the paradoxes that emerge are more than logistical and administrative ones. Building from Hannah Arendt’s understanding of banality as a rote thoughtlessness in political life, I argue that globalized political projects aimed at doing good can also be wrought by such a thoughtlessness when they trade official gestures of institutional compliance for more trenchant strategies of political-economic change.
B. Geographies of Allergy: To See Worlds in a Grain of Pollen
I am currently working on a new research project that looks to allergy as an important site for tracing shifting understandings of the relationships between bodies and their environments. My present focus is the increasing rate of pollen allergy (kafunshō) in Japan, where today up to an estimated 50% of the population suffers from pollinosis to two cross-reactive varieties of conifers: sugi (Cryptomeria japonica, Japanese cedar) and hinoki (Chamaecyparis obtuse, Japanese cypress). The increase in pollen allergy in Japan has been precipitous since the 1960s—the first twenty-one cases were only identified in 1963—and the Japanese government has declared pollinosis the “national disease” (kokuminbyō), allocating resources to address it. My research tracks the development of this hay fever epidemic through intersecting environmental, public health, cultural, and geopolitical histories in Japan and beyond. It considers how these histories are reshaping relationships between human bodies and trees at global, national, personal, and subcellular levels.
C. Filipina Migration to Japan: Intimate Encounters
My first book, Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (UC Press, 2009) took its point of departure from an apparent paradox of ethnic and cultural identity in contemporary Japan: How is it possible that Filipina women who entered Japan to work as entertainers in hostess bars and clubs, and who were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners, came to be described by rural townspeople as ii oyomesan, ideal traditional Japanese brides and daughters-in-law? Intimate Encounters demonstrates that to answer such a question we need to consider not only capitalist processes and questions of culture and human agency, but also the dynamic and unequal ways that Filipina migrants’ and Japanese residents’ desires and agendas engage in everyday life: the resonances among their understandings of marriage and kinship; the misunderstandings prompted by Filipina women’s endeavors to be good Catholic wives; and the unsettling gaps that emerge when dissatisfied women run away. The book aims, in part, to offer new ways of understanding cultural regions by situating Japan, the Philippines, and the United States in a shared “zone of encounters” that is shaped by gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture, as well as by transnational political economic processes.
D. Matsutake Worlds: Elusive Matsutake
I have also been a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group (MWRG), a long-term collaborative research project exploring matsutake (pine mushroom) commodity chains across the Pacific Rim and beyond. This project has examined what a mushroom’s cosmopolitan itineraries can teach us about the dynamics of multispecies relations. Other MWRG members include Tim Choy (UC Davis), Elaine Gan (Wesleyan University), Michael Hathaway (Simon Fraser), Miyako Inoue (Stanford University), Shiho Satsuka (University of Toronto), and Anna Tsing (UC Santa Cruz).
E. AI and the Science of Neurodivergence: The Diagnosis and Care of Autism
Finally, I have recently begun a collaborative research project with Purnima Mankekar (UCLA Anthropology) on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autism spectrum disorder. Together, we are exploring the new understandings of diagnosis and care that are emerging alongside the development and application of AI technologies. My focus in this project currently centers on how AI is being utilized in recent autism research and diagnosis centered on “brain-mapping” to identify “neurodivergent” brain pathways and link them to social behaviors.
Selected Publications
Books
Faier, Lieba. 2024. The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Reprinted by Ateneo de Manila Press in 2011 in the series Empire, Nation, Diaspora edited by Vicente Rafael.
Edited Volumes
Faier, Lieba and Michael Hathaway, eds. 2021. Matsutake Worlds. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
- Expanded reprint of Faier, Lieba and Michael Hathaway 2018. “Special Issue: Matsutake Worlds.” Social Analysis 62(4).
Articles
Faier, Lieba. 2021 “Planetary Urban Involution in the Tokyo Suburbs.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45(4): 630-642.
Faier, Lieba. 2018. “Introduction: Elusive Matsutake.” Social Analysis, 62(4): 1-16.
Faier, Lieba. 2018. “Euphoric Anomaly: Matsutake’s Elusive Elusiveness in 2010 Japan.” Social Analysis, 62(4): 17-36.
Faier, Lieba and Lisa Rofel. 2014. “The Ethnography of Encounters.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43(1): 363-377.
Faier, Lieba. 2013. “Everyday Articulations of Prostitution.” Gender, Place and Culture 21(8): 979-995.
Faier, Lieba. 2013. “Affective investments in the Manila region: Filipina migrants in rural Japan and transnational urban development in the Philippines.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 376–390. (available online: doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00533.x).
Faier, Lieba. 2011 “Chapter 12: The Worldly Work of Writing Social Geography” in A Companion to Social Geography, Paul Cloke, Vincent Del Casino, Ruth Panelli, and Mary Thomas, eds., Wiley-Blackwell, 198-213.
Faier, Lieba. 2011 “Fungi, Trees, People, Nematodes, Beetles, and Weather: Ecologies of Vulnerability and Ecologies of Negotiation in Matsutake Commodity Exchange.” Environment and Planning A. (Special issue on “Disarticulations in Commodity Chains,” guest edited by Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner) 43(5): 1079-1097. (PDF)
The Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing). 2009. “A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds.” American Ethnologist 36(2): 380-403. (PDF)
Faier, Lieba. 2008. “Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina ‘Oyomesan’ in Rural Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 23(4): 630-659. (PDF)
Faier, Lieba. 2007. “Filipina Migrants in Rural Japan and their Professions of Love.” American Ethnologist 34(1): 148-162. (PDF)
Grants & Awards
(Selected)
ACLS Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, 2017-2018
Howard Fellowship, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation at Brown University, 2017-2018
Hellman Fellowship, 2011-2012
Toyota Foundation Grant (with Tim Choy, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing for the Matsutake Worlds Research Group), 2007-2009
SSRC Abe Fellowship, 2006-2008
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Cornell University, The Society for the Humanities and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, 2004-2005
Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2003-2004
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Grant, 2000
Fulbright Fellowship (Japan), 1998-2000
Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and College Honors, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993
Courses & Presentations
Past Graduate Seminars
“More-than-Human-Worlds”
“Bodies and Environments” (Co-taught with Juan Herrera)
“The Ethnography of Place and Space”
“Thinking Globally”
“Embodiment, Power, Place”
“Ethnographic Methods”
“Grant Writing”
Undergraduate Courses
“Introduction to Cultural Geography”
“Feminist Geography”
“Slavery and Human Trafficking”
“Japan in the World”
“Geographies of Sustainability and Unsustainability” (for Spring 2024)
Graduate Students
Former Advisees
Timur Hammond, Assistant Professor of Geography, Syracuse University
Tuyen Le, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow (2021)
Current Advisees
Alexandra Boesel
Zachary Frial
I have also served on the dissertation committees of:
Vanessa Banta, Chen Chen, Ashley Fent, Sara Hughes, Min Joo Lee, Ryoko Nishijima,
Stephanie Santos, and Preeti Sharma
