Jane Aiko Komori

JANE KOMORI, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz, California, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Japanese Canadian Food Practices as Theories of the Settler Colony: Farming, Foraging, and Gardening in Western Canada in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” supervised by Dr. Anna Tsing. Funding supported study of historical and contemporary Japanese Canadian foraging, gardening, and farming practices in British Columbia. As a remote research project, the study combined findings from virtual interviews with Japanese Canadian farmers; materials supplied by a research assistant; and thematic analysis of digitized oral history interviews. In conversation with research participants, the project became increasingly focused on historical questions to do with Japanese Canadian food practices prior to the mass incarceration of the community during the Second World War. Altogether, the data collected allowed the grantee to examine the experiences of Japanese Canadians from the 1880s to the present, which is taken as an entry point for theorizing the tensions and solidarities between settler, migrant, and Indigenous workers and the state in agriculture and other primary resource industries.