Ars Vivendi E-mail Magazine No.207 (16 December 2025)
■A fruitful East Asia Disability Studies Forum in Osaka
The East Asia Disability Studies Forum met at the Osaka Ibaraki Campus of Ritsumeikan University in Osaka, Japan, on 25 and 26 October 2025. The overarching theme of the event was “Nothing about Us without Us: Voice, Participation and Community Building”. The Osaka Forum was hosted by the Institute of Ars Vivendi, Ritsumeikan University and co-organized by the Japan Society for Disability Studies. Most of the overseas participants were from Korean Society for Disability Studies, Taiwan Society for Disability Studies, and academic and civil society organizations in China, that have been working for this East Asian forum on disability studies.
Please visit https://www.arsvi.com/a/20251025-26e.htm for the programme and presentations.
The Forum was held with simultaneous interpretation in Korean, Chinese and Japanese, as well as Japanese Sign Language and Japanese subtitles, with AI-translated subtitles in Korean and Chinese. This was the first time the Forum was held with three-language subtitles.
Ensuring high-quality accessibility of information is not cheap, but we did our best to make it happen. International conferences are usually held in English, but this can exclude people who are not accustomed to communicating in English. Furthermore, East Asian values and sensibilities are difficult to express in English, so our own languages are the most appropriate for discussing disabilities in East Asia.
In addition to information accessibility, the forum also prioritized mobility. Wheelchair users encounter difficulties in classrooms with fixed type of chairs and desks, or in classrooms in tiers halls, which are common in university settings. After exploring university and other facilities in the Kansai region, we chose the Event Hall at Ritsumeikan Ibaraki Future Plaza with completely flat floor as the venue.
The Forum was originally scheduled to take place in China in 2025, but the Chinese partners deemed it too challenging to host the event, so it was moved to Japan one year earlier. The situation in East Asia has made in-person gatherings more challenging yet more important than ever. We hope that academic and civil society exchanges in East Asia will continue.
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General Editor: Tatsuya Mima
Chief Editor: Kasumi Ito
Published by Institute of Ars Vivendi, Ritsumeikan University
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