DrShiori Shakuto

Shiori Shakuto is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, where her research brings feminist and public anthropology into conversation with the everyday politics of ageing, care, and domestic life. She approaches the household as a dynamic site where taken-for-granted norms around work, gender, and value can be re-examined and reimagined. She holds a PhD and LLB from the Australian National University and an MSc from the University of Oxford.

Her first book, After Work (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), offers a transnational feminist ethnography of Japanese “silver backpackers” who relocate to Malaysia in mid-life and retirement. Through fifteen months of fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur, the book interrogates what comes after salaried work, revealing how anxieties around identity, belonging, and domestic labour are shaped by Japan’s capitalist work regime and dominant discourses of successful ageing. By tracing how older women and men differently navigate leisure, care, and everyday life abroad, After Work expands current understandings of ageing, gender, migration, and the future of work in an increasingly interconnected Asia.

Shiori’s second major project follows the lives of plastic waste as it travels from the Global North to the Global South. Working closely with collaborators in Japan and Singapore, she examines the gendered household practices that link intimate domestic routines with large-scale inequalities in waste governance, asking how feminist and transnational approaches might inspire more just environmental futures. You can read more about the project here: https://followtheplastics.com/ 

Collaboration underpins her scholarship. Beyond anthropology, she has taught interdisciplinary and design-oriented courses, worked with the Tokyo-based art collective teamLab, and partnered with museums and community organisations. Before joining Sydney in 2022, she held positions at Tokyo College (University of Tokyo) and the Asia Research Institute (NUS). Originally from Himeji, a castle town of Japan, she now lives in Australia with her family. 

She is currently on parental leave, getting to know the little one.