Alexander Burns is the head of news at POLITICO. He has covered politics and power for more than a decade, including as national political correspondent for The New York Times during the 2020 presidential election. A graduate of Harvard College, he edited the Harvard Political Review. In 2022, he co-authored the bestselling book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.” Burns writes POLITICO’s Tomorrow column, which explores the future of politics and policy debates that cross national lines.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Soviet-born British journalist, author and TV producer. He is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Arena Initiative. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Peter grew up in the U.K. He is the author of several books about Russian and other authoritarian propaganda; the third of these, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, was published in 2024

Adriaan Basson is editor-in-chief of News24 and the author of four books on corruption and current affairs. He is the recipient of multiple awards for investigative journalism, including the CNN African Journalist of the Year for news and the Taco Kuiper award. Basson worked as an investigative journalist on the Mail & Guardian, where he was a founding member of amaBhungane, before moving to City Press as assistant editor. In 2013, he became editor of Beeld and in 2016 was appointed editor-in-chief of News24.

Hugo Alconada Mon is an Argentinian journalist specialised in Investigative Journalism about corruption in politics, money laundering and corporate fraud. He’s been woking for more than 20 years in La Nación, one of Argentina media outlet leaders, and he is part of the newspapers’ main editor team since 2009. Currently, he also writes for the Spanish journal El País. He is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and worked on the Panama Papers.

Andrew Bernard has been on the faculty at Tuck since 1999 and in 2017 was named the Kadas T’90 Distinguished Professor. Bernard is currently an Astor Visiting Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford.

'Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World' is the result of the Meiji Restoration sesquicentennial conference held at St Antony’s College in 2019. It rethinks the way in which ‘the Opening of Japan’ constitutes a historical event that connected the archipelago to the wider world.

I was puzzled why Japanese sociologists who study social mobility or social inequality don't use the concept of "class" or kaikyu（階級）in Japanese, while using the term when writing in English. In Japanese, instead, they use kaisho (階層), whose literal translation in English is “strata.”

The coronavirus pandemic suddenly closed Japan’s doors to inbound tourism and migration in early 2020s. But those doors were never going to be closed indefinitely. The pandemic, originating in Wuhan, revealed the centrality of China in particular to Japan’s immigration dilemma. China’s transformation in the twenty-first century into an economic superpower has been an understudied possible motivation for Japan’s government to liberalise the country’s immigration regime as a tool for retaining influence in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

This lecture examines the medical discourse of the ‘feebleminded’, which emerged in 1950s Japan in the process of implementing involuntary sterilization under the Eugenic Protection Law (1948-96). It shows how the medical discourse was gendered and caricatured their sexuality as a threat to social order. It then argues that the making of the medical knowledge about the ‘feebleminded’, though appearing as scientific, was a social act, by describing how the patient’s families were involved in the making of the knowledge.