MORI Soya

MORI Soya

MORI Soya
[Belonging・Position] Gender and Social Development Studies Group, Interdisciplinary Research Center ・Senior Research Fellow
[Research Field] Development Economics (Industrial Organization), Disability and Development, Sign Linguistics
[email] Soya_Mori E-mail
Profile Information (Research history, education, papers & publications)

Previous research

After joining the Institute, I started a research project on Asian industrialization and investigated the industrial organization of the manufacturing sector. After returning from my first overseas assignment, I focused on competitions between foreign capital and local capital in the Philippines. Then, in the 2000s, I came across a new field of study, disabilities and economic development, and my research has focused mainly on that field since then. My main research results were published in the books Reducing Poverty among People with Disabilities in Developing Countries: How They Make a Living (Iwanami Shoten, 2010; in Japanese; 2011 Special Award of the Japan Society for International Development) and Empirical Analysis of People's Disabilities and Economic Development: A Social Model Perspective (coauthored with Tatsufumi Yamagata; Keiso Shobo, 2013; in Japanese; 17th Okita Memorial Prize in International Development). Subsequently, I have continued researching issues related to the lives of people with disabilities and poverty in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and other regions.

Current research projects

Though the full-time activities at the Institute come to an end, I still continue to lead a research project on sign languages in developing countries, linking the linguistics of sign languages, which is one of my research areas, with development studies. In the field of sign language linguistics, I have contributed sign language-related entries to Kojien (published by Iwanami Shoten) as well as encyclopedias published in Japan and overseas. In addition, in the early 2000s, I served as the president of Sign LanguageLanguage Studies Japan, the only sign-language researcher society in
Japan, the only sign-language research society in Japan, and I have continuously served as an editorial board member for several international journals. Collaborating with researchers from the Philippines, on which my research mainly focuses, as well as East Africa, West Africa, South Africa, China, Brazil, and India, I would like to clarify the status of sign languages in these countries, which is largely unknown in Japan, despite the fact that it is frequently mentioned in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.