معرفی
Yukino Iwai is Associate Professor at the Hirayama Ikuo Memorial Volunteer Center, Waseda University, Japan, where she has taught since 2005. Holding a Ph.D. in African Area Studies from Kyoto University, she combines environmental-sociology fieldwork in East Africa with service-learning pedagogy for Japanese students.
Education:
- Ph.D. (2003) Graduate School of Human & Environmental Studies, Kyoto University – African Area Studies
- B.S. (1993) Tokyo University of Agriculture & Technology – Environmental Conservation, Faculty of Agriculture
Research Focus: Her work explores human–wildlife conflict, community-based conservation, the sociology of “coexistence,” and the politics of tourism benefit-sharing around protected areas such as Serengeti National Park. She also investigates how volunteer experiences and project-based tourism reshape both student learning trajectories and host communities in Africa.
Recent Articles Trend: Across her 15 most recent papers, three intertwined strands emerge: (i) empirical documentation of elephant crop-raiding and community-led mitigation, (ii) critical political-ecology analyses of conservation interventions that sometimes devolve into “green grabs,” and (iii) reflective studies on service-learning pedagogy that translate overseas field engagement into Japanese university curricula.
Grants & Projects: She currently leads a JSPS KAKENHI project (2023-2027) on nature-conservation schemes in the post-“local-community” era and another (2022-2025) evaluating sustainable, community-run elephant-chasing teams in Tanzania.
Teaching: At Waseda’s Global Education Center she offers a dozen courses annually—ranging from “Hunting and Human-Wildlife Conflict” to “Theory of Volunteerism”—that embed students in domestic and international experiential-learning practicums.
