Gracia Liu-Farrer

Gracia Liu-Farrer is professor of sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migration at Waseda University, Japan. Her research examines immigration into Japan, transnational labor and student mobilities in East Asia as well as between Asia and Europe. She hopes to bring Asian experiences to migration and mobility theorization.

The project

Title: From Local Cooks to Global Chefs: the Social Construction of Skilled Japanese culinary Labor through global mobility

"This project investigates the mobility and skill construction process of Japanese culinary workers in Paris. In recent decades, an elite form of global Japanese cuisine, combining French and Japanese techniques, ingredients and aesthetics, has emerged. Such hybridized Japanese cuisine has been considered state-of-art in the gastronomic world. Japanese culinary workers are able to make this art because they have acquired skills through cross-border mobility and through crossing culinary boundaries by working in famous restaurants overseas, especially in France. This project also aims to conduct qualitative interviews with Japanese culinary workers in Paris to understand:

1. the career aspirations of young Japanese culinary workers in France their strategies for developing such career;
2. How global mobility factors in their career aspirations;
3. How legal-social institutions, including migration policies, hospitality industry, educational institutions, and labor market create incentives and pathways for cross-border mobility;
4. How Japanese chefs overseas build skills and develop their careers."

Hosting institution:  Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• 2025    Liu-Farrer, G. Social Construction of Skill in International Migration: Perspectives from Asia. Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 51.
• 2024    Liu-Farrer, G., Pearlman, W. and Al-Masri, M., 2024. Neoliberal humanitarianism: Contradictory policy logics and Syrian refugee experiences in Japan. Migration Studies, p.mnae007.
• 2023     Liu-Farrer, Gracia, Anne E. Green, Ceren Ozgen, and Matthew A. Cole. "Immigration and labor shortages: Learning from Japan and the United Kingdom." Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 32, no. 2 (2023): 336-361.
• 2022    Fresnoza-Flot, A. and Liu-Farrer, G. eds., 2022. Tangled mobilities: Places, affects, and personhood across social spheres in Asian migration (Vol. 12). Berghahn Books.
• 2020   Liu-Farrer, G.  Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society, Cornell University Press. ISBN13: 9781501748622.