Report on the Dispatch to the United States of America: Collaboration with UCLA and UCSD

Michie Kawashima
Associate Professor
Department of International Relations
Kyoto Sangyo University

From Dec. 27th 2022 to Jan. 5th 2023, I visited University of California, Los Angeles and University of California San Diego. During my stay, I had a couple meetings with world-famous researchers associated with these research institutions. The details as follows. 

First of all, I met with Dr. Candy Goodwin, Professor Emeritus UCLA Anthropology department. She is a well-known researcher in the field of child and young adult interaction. After sharing the aim and content of our current project, she gave some insights from her experience of running huge grants and we discussed details of multimodal aspects of child interaction. In order to further develop our analysis on child group interaction, it was very fruitful time. 

Unfortunately, it was not possible to meet with Dr. John Heritage, Distinguished Professor ULCA Sociology department due to his health condition. However, our online communication, we were able to discuss our current project and he gave us some suggestions on medical interaction and its future possibilities. 

Second, the meeting with Dr. Tanya Stivers, a current Chair of Sociology department UCLA was also excellent opportunity for our project since we were able to discuss a possibility of her visit in Japan next year and future collaboration with details. Since I am an alumna of UCLA and worked on a research project with Dr. Stivers, we discussed some current research situations. She conducts some large scale interactional comparisons with her current research. In order to speculate future possibility of our current project, it was very constructive discussion. 

Lastly, I visited UCSD and met with Dr. Federico Rossano in the field of Cognitive Science. I have known him over 20 years since we studied at UCLA together. Now he is conducting some provocative research on animal behavior and interaction. We visited San Diego Zoo, which is one of his research fields. It was very interesting to see his search participants; some chimpanzees at the zoo. It was intriguing experience for our future project on child play.