Researcher's Profile

March 1992	Completion of the Doctoral Course in Education, Tokyo Metropolitan University（TMU）
April 1992	Special Researcher, The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science（Graduate School of Education, TMU）
July 1996	Assistant Professor, Department of Social Science and Humanities, TMU
December 1996	Associate Professor, Education Department, Kanazawa University
April 2001	Associate Professor, RCAST, The University of Tokyo(UTokyo)
Jun 2008	Ph.D, UTokyo
October 2008	Ph.D, UTokyo Professor, RCAST, UTokyo

People with disabilities and those of advanced age face a diversity of "barriers" in modern society. These include "physical barriers" related to housing and roads, "information and cultural barriers" involving access to information, "barriers of the mind" rooted in a person's consciousness, and "barriers of the legal system" inherent in social systems. While clarifying the actual conditions of these barriers, our research aims to remove these barriers through the structural analysis of factors such as the mechanisms that give birth to the barriers in the first place, the mutual relationship between different barriers, and the ideological background behind the barriers. We put particular emphasis on the viewpoint of and actual feelings experienced in life by the concerned persons themselves - mainly persons with disabilities - as the essential foundation for developing our research.