School of International Liberal StudiesWaseda University

Hello! My name is Azumi Sakamoto, and I am a Research Associate at SILS/GSICCS.

I specialize in film studies, but I also consider myself a part of ecocriticism and animal studies – interdisciplinary fields devoted to exploring the intersections between nature and culture. I am interested in the ways nature and animals are represented in culture, as well as how culture shapes the way we understand ecology, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. By focusing on the space where nature and culture meet, I aim to trace the workings of anthropocentric logic and to highlight cultural narratives that complicate or challenge it.

I am currently writing my dissertation on how insects are represented in film. In thinking about areas where nature and culture interact, insects are fascinating because they are often feared as being radically different from humans, and yet they mirror behavior that we tend to see as uniquely human – cooperation, division of labor, farming, and even domestication. They occupy somewhat of a paradoxical space in the human imagination.

My research focuses on American cinema of the 1970s, a period marked by rising environmental consciousness and growing popularity of insects in culture. Through historical analysis of the period’s social and scientific discourse on animals, animal-human relations, and ecology, I situate the films within a broader shift of how humans conceptualized their relationship to nonhuman life.

Drawing on ecocriticism and animal studies, I examine how representations of insects in film reflect, reproduce, or resist anthropocentric ideology. This involves not only challenging human-centric thinking but also examining how the exploitation and domination of animals are connected to other forms of social oppression. I am especially interested in how insects – as animals that are both like-us and nothing-like-us – can reveal the limits of humanism and offer new ways of imagining life beyond human hierarchies.