Yuhki Tajima

What’s the greatest challenge in your field today?
The challenge is to ask big questions at the same time as having the data and methods to rigorously test causality. Usually, people tend to ask big questions, but it’s harder to get really definitive data, to test whether the evidence supports it. The other way around, people do a really good job of identifying causal impacts of something, but are not really asking the big questions. So, the challenge is to do both, and often times it’s a tradeoff there.

What’s the most fascinating question in your field or research?
I would say, the most fascinating phenomenon is how much variation there is in the penetration of states into societies and what unintended consequences they have. We think of the state as this sort of monolithic entity — we go back to Thomas Hobbes, where the state sort of provides order, or the state that has the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, but when we actually look at the influence of the state from location to location, there’s actually a lot of variation.
Like the U.S., which actually does have a really strong state, relative to other places, but the penetration of the state even in the U.S. varies significantly. You can be really in the gaze of the state, like if you’re right next to the police station, or you can be in the pockets that are beyond the gaze of the state, where you have hackers or like in Appalachia, where people don’t want to be monitored by the state, or the upper peninsula of Michigan.
So, what I look at is in Indonesia and how there’s a lot of variation in the state. In urban areas, you go to some areas, and the state is really just pervasive, and they affect everything about the organization of a particular neighborhood. And other areas, maybe just a kilometer away, it’s very tenuous, the presence of the state, so people organize themselves in different ways. Just knowing the state is there changes the way that people think and organize themselves. You’ll see that communities organize themselves in ways where they don’t count on the state to do very much. That has a lot of implications for economics, political violence, even sort of cultural norms and how people deal with each other socially.

How did you narrow your focus to what you study today?
As an undergrad, I was a physics major, and that was interesting because we got to ask big questions and answer them rigorously, but I was interested in more social pursuits. One of the things I started really gravitating toward was poverty, especially in developing countries. I had a friend from Indonesia, so I visited him, and he was working out in Timor-Leste when they were trying to become free from Indonesia, and so that’s how I got interested in Timor-Leste and Indonesian politics. I had an opportunity in grad school to go to Timor-Leste, and I was still thinking of developmental economics on its own, but then I started realizing that a lot of the outcomes of economic development are contingent on political stability. That’s why I thought this is an interesting intersection to look at between political violence, for example, and economic development.

What’s the greatest challenge you face in teaching?
I’ve taught very wide ranging courses. I used to teach a course with 270 students, and that has its own challenges, especially just getting people to pay attention in a class that big. It’s really hard to engage people. I always try to engage students so that it’s a dialogue. But teaching a smaller course has its own challenges because the expectations are a little different. It puts a lot more pressure on the students.
I don’t really find there to be that many challenges in teaching. There are challenges, sometimes material, for example, that might be very technical — the challenge is to make it intuitive for students. But that’s what teaching really is for me, finding ways to make technical concepts intuitive, so it’s not really a challenge. I don’t know if I succeed or fail at it, but it’s just the job.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
I’m kind of teaching them already — ethnic politics and political economy of Asia. I like teaching both of them.

What drew you to Georgetown? How does Georgetown compare to teaching in the west at U.C. Riverside?
The weather is definitely better out in California, but what I like about Georgetown is there’s a really, among the students and faculty, an interest in engaging with policymaking. A lot of my research is working closely with policy makers, so just being in that nexus between academia and policymaking was a very natural fit for me. Georgetown is one of the best places to kind of bring those two together. My master’s was at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and I kind of got used to that intersection between policymakers and academia. There are certainly only a few places that replicate that kind of intensive intersection between those two worlds, so that’s why Georgetown was a natural fit for me.

What are your impressions of Georgetown students?
I’ve previously taught students at Harvard and U.C. Riverside. I would say that Georgetown students are incredibly engaged with the real world and very curious, ambitious. They’ve been extremely impressive in my classes, and I had been told that the undergrads here at Georgetown would be very impressive. You always discount the hype, but then when it came down to it, my students have been quite able to exceed expectations. That was very impressive — that they were able to exceed the hype.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in academia?
I’d probably be working in some development bank or agency.

What’s something you wish more students would take away from your courses?
What I hope students take away is the ability to not just be critical of arguments and evidence, but analytical also. Oftentimes, students, both undergrad and grad students, learn to critique, but I find that critiquing is easier than finding alternatives that are better to improve upon the things that are being critiqued. What’s hard is to analyze and think of other ways to improve an argument and test arguments.
I want students to be able to engage with the world in both a critical and analytical way so they feel empowered to actually make well-informed decisions, both professionally and personally. Right now, we’re inundated with all this information, and if you don’t have these tools to be critical and analytical, it’s easy to be rudder-less — you can be swayed by the latest thing you hear on the news or TV. … It’s not to say that students should become experts on every topic, but that they should build up these tools so they can feel more empowered when they talk to their doctors, for example, or when they’re reading about some policy idea or when they hear some debate over scientific topics, or politics or economics or whatnot. I want them to be able to really have the confidence to tease out what is more compelling more than stuff that is less plausible.

Interview by Penny Hung