Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research interests focus on issues of representation in film, mass media, art, performance, and cultural display. She is a founding member of the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia. Her dissertation Visualizing Japanese-America: the Japanese American National Museum and the Construction of Identity examined the role of the Japanese American National Museum in the construction and dissemination of a Japanese-American identity.

Patti Hirahara is an advocate in preserving the Japanese American legacy in the United States. She spoke at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum about the Japanese American incarceration and her family’s 2,000+ photographs taken and processed in a secret underground darkroom in a Wyoming Japanese incarceration camp during WWII. She has helped create and research information on the Anaheim Japanese pioneers, before and after WWII, for the current Muzeo exhibition “I AM AN AMERICAN: Japanese Incarceration in a Time of Fear” and her family is highlighted in the exhibition.

Jonelle Strickland teaches research writing and first-year composition in the School of Criminal Justice at California State University Long Beach and in the English department at Santiago Canyon College, respectively. She is proud to be a Dreamer Ally and an advocate for all of her students.

Producer: Heritage Future
Host: Jonelle Strickland
Guest: Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa and Patti Hirahara
Audio: Brew Sessions Live
Creative + Cultural Podcast music composed and performed by Dan Reckard

Chapters is a five-part Creative + Cultural Podcast series dedicated to stories surrounding the exclusion, forced removal, and internment of Japanese-Americans. The program also parallels a narrative thread through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

This project was made possible with support from Chapman University, The California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library and from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit chapman.edu, library.ca.gov and calhum.org.

This episode was recorded live on October 6 at the Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center in Anaheim, CA.