She is a cultural and visual anthropologist whose research focuses on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements. In 2006, she published _Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity_, an ethnography of sign language and deaf social movements in contemporary Japan. This book was awarded the John Whitney Hall Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. She has recently completed a book and two films on schizophrenia and mental illness in contemporary Japan which will be published by Cornell University Press in April 2013. Currently she is working on the intersections of sexuality and disability in Okinawa.