What does it mean to be a “public scholar" in the age of social media?

For the 2023 Modern Languages Association Annual Convention, I was invited to contribute to a roundtable panel on“precarities in public scholarship and on public platforms in Japanese studies." The panel was organized by Andrea Mendoza (University of California, San Diego) and Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia) and brought together six scholars to speak about the challenges and possibilities for public scholarship in the age of social media. The participants work in both Japan and the United States and also included: Paula Curtis (University of California, Los Angeles), Sae Kitamura (Musashi University), Akiko Shimizu (University of Tokyo), and Tomomi Yamaguchi (Montana State University). The panel made it possible for all of us to speak from our personal experiences of online harassment, to discuss the challenges and importance of public-facing engagement, and to share best practices from the space of Japanese studies.