Paul Christensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3671966 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Christensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Christensen |
| SIGNATURE | CHRISTENSEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2442-1024 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Fraught Narratives, Contrived Futures: Tokyo’s Techno-Utopian Erasure of the Unhoused
Mirai – future – is ubiquitously written into Tokyo’s cityscape. Yet the promises embedded in future-oriented government initiatives like Health Japan 21, Innovation 25, Society 5.0, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), reveal a growing disconnect between techno-utopian visions and lived realities. Here I explore this tension by examining how advocacy organizations for Tokyo’s unhoused provide a more humane, dignity-oriented future, chal…
Demographic decline as an idiom of distress: Rethinking gender (In)equality in Japan
The world faces overlapping crises of global scale and consequence. Given limited attention and capacity, which crises garner attention and framing as important? Which are neglected in ways reflective of broader, systemic concerns that challenge established institutional arrangements? Here, we place gender inequality, a key topic raised by Japanese governmental and non-governmental organizations, in conversation with national level open-response …
Selective development goals: Examining Japan’s SDG implementation gaps
In this article, we consider how efforts by the Japanese government and private sector to make the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) prominent and pervasive reveal obfuscation around issues and concerns purportedly being addressed. We examine three specific components of the SDGs: no poverty, zero hunger, and gender equality. In doing so, we demonstrate a disjuncture between official proclamations endorsing an SDG agenda and et…
The Fictitious Shine of Japan's Future
Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko's vision of a city where everyone can "shine" masks systemic contradictions in Japan's future-making endeavors. While public proclamations frame Tokyo as inclusive and equitable, actions by Koike's administration reveal abiding inequities. These efforts align with decades-long projects, most recently manifested in Society 5.0 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which prioritize market-driven growth while eras…
Symptomatic Trauma: Japan, Drug Addiction, and the Limits of Treatment
Possession and use of illegal drugs carry harsh penalties in Japan if an individual is apprehended by authorities. These severe legal restrictions stigmatize drug use while failing to eliminate narcotics from Japan. This makes individual efforts to take on recovery difficult, as admissions of past use are often met with fear and disdain. Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Center (DARC) is a Japanese organization that helps individuals work a program b…
Fake Meets Soul: Division Among Hawai'i's Japanese Surfers
This article examines the Japanese surf community in and around Honolulu, Hawai'i. I argue that a variety of factors, notably socioeconomic status and access to wealth, interpretation of popular media depictions that surround surfing, and a desire to project a 'cool' bodily image, result in division within this community between those labeled as either 'fake' or 'soul' surfers. A division exacerbated by anger and frustration among Japanese soul s…
A New Reading of the Damonon Stele
Better Must Come: Existing Homelessness in Two Global Cities
Homelessness is a tragic yet ubiquitous aspect of urban life across the US and a less overt but nonetheless visible part of daily life in Japan’s major cities. Equally present is the ability of middle- and upper-class Americans and Japanese to frequently and collectively ignore, dismiss, or explain away homelessness as an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of city life under capitalism. For many reading this in San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto, or a…
Non-National Bodies in a National Pastime: Japan, Baseball, and the Manufacturing of Difference
Baseball occupies a privileged position as Japan’s most popular sport, commanding ample attention across numerous levels and contexts of play. Baseball’s popularity has also inspired value-laden and sometimes nationalistic language around its athletes and how the sport is played. These associations, linking baseball and its athletes to the Japanese nation today, arise in a diverse sporting landscape where transnational movement by athletically gi…
The recovery revolution
Scripting Addiction, Constraining Recovery: Alcoholism and Ideology in Japan
Japan’s medical establishment relies heavily on the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) in treating the nation’s addicts and alcoholics. Japanese individuals diagnosed as ‘alcohol dependent’ and trying to stay sober must embrace and fully incorporate a prescribed recovery ideology into their daily life. A.A. demands acceptance of alcoholism as a lifelong and incurable disease, requires belief in the possibility of a ‘spiritual transformation’…
The program is perfect
This article examines Narcotics Anonymous (NA) membership in two ways: how blame for failure is displaced from the 'perfect' organizational program and onto the individual addict working to remain sober and how this displacement is accompanied by notions of individual responsibility and work. These discourses illustrate the influence of a neoliberal outlook on the life course among 'clean' NA members, particularly as the social safety net in the …
Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo
Depictions of an alcohol-saturated Japan populated by intoxicated salarymen, beer dispensing vending machines, and a generally tolerant approach to public drunkenness, typify domestic and international perceptions of Japanese drinking. Even the popular definitions of Japanese masculinity are interwoven with accounts of personal alcohol consumption in public settings; gender norms that exclude and marginalize the alcoholic. And yet the alcoholic a…
Connoisseurship and drunkenness in Tokyo
Real Men Don't Hold Their Liquor: The Complexity of Drunkenness and Sobriety in a Tokyo Bar
This paper looks at the performance of drunkenness among primarily male patrons at a bar in an upscale Tokyo neighborhood. I look at how my experience working as a bartender and observing the drunken, sober, and sometimes performative behavior of customers initially clashed with my preconceptions of gender norms surrounding alcohol consumption—specifically the notion that to properly perform as a male drinker one must be able to ‘hold one’s liquo…
Darvish in Texas: Haafu identity and athletic celebrity
In early December 2011 the Nippon Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) "posted" Yu Darvish, making him eligible to field contract offers from Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the United States. Darvish, a tall, handsome then 24 year old who, from 2005-2011, was the team's ace pitcher, had been the frequent subject of speculation: would he, and if so when, leave Japan for American baseball. By December 19 the Texas Rangers had wo…
With a Bible and a Gun
With a Bible and a Gun Paul Christensen (bio) It was for a worthy cause, all the killing, the torture, the rape of the women who ran for their lives down the paths, and through the woods. We shot the children, too. And then the ponies tied to the saplings by the creek. We killed until our hands were numb, and our trigger fingers bled. That is the way the west was won, with a bible and a gun. When we came back and drank in the saloon, and shot eac…
Hiking at Burrito Canyon
Hiking at Burrito Canyon Paul Christensen (bio) All night tossing in bed, the heat pushing the ceiling down on me, I defined my connection to God: a divinity who grows in the not-seen, like the furniture that recedes from a dark bedroom, present by its absence. That comfort, so practical in daylight, becomes the boundless ease on which the soul surrenders all its gravity, and floats upward in the night to those invisible arms. Meister Eckhardt fo…
Epicurean and Stoic Sources for Boisguilbert's Physiological and Hippocratic Vision of Nature and Economics
epicureanism, stoicism, Boisguilbert
Believing
The Passing of Anglo-America
The process of malting colonies out of other peoples' land involves, among other things, a certain amount of mythology, creation mythology, to overcome the moral revulsion of seizing property and deracinating an indigenous population. An ennobling aim is necessary, and the form such moves talce is usually the vision that a higher culture, a superior seed of human understanding, is being passed to an uncultured other. The notion lies close to rape…
Fire, motion, and productivity: The proto-energetics of nature and economy in François Quesnay
Chez nous, pour nous, tout est physique, et le moral en dérive.Quesnay in a marginal note to a text of Mirabeau (Weulersse 1910, 122)
Ecological economics: Economics, environment and society
The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry: 1914-1928
In this, the only full-length study of the visual poetry of the early twentieth century, Willard Bohn expertly illuminates the works of Apollinaire, Josep-Maria Junow, Guillermo de Torre, and others. His fascinating aesthetic insights bring to life this elusive and often misunderstood genre. An important contribution. Highly sophisticated, the study tends to raise its reader's impression of visual poetry in the twentieth century from trivial past…
Historical roots for ecological economics — Biophysical versus allocative approaches
Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science
Research Article| November 01 1989 Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science Paul P. Christensen Paul P. Christensen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1989) 21 (4): 689–709. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-21-4-689 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul P. Christensen; Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science. History of P…
Land abundance and cheap horsepower in the mechanization of the antebellum United States economy
Epicurean and Stoic Sources for Boisguilbert's Physiological and Hippocratic Vision of Nature and Economics
epicureanism, stoicism, Boisguilbert
Non-National Bodies in a National Pastime: Japan, Baseball, and the Manufacturing of Difference
Baseball occupies a privileged position as Japan’s most popular sport, commanding ample attention across numerous levels and contexts of play. Baseball’s popularity has also inspired value-laden and sometimes nationalistic language around its athletes and how the sport is played. These associations, linking baseball and its athletes to the Japanese nation today, arise in a diverse sporting landscape where transnational movement by athletically gi…
The Fictitious Shine of Japan's Future
Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko's vision of a city where everyone can "shine" masks systemic contradictions in Japan's future-making endeavors. While public proclamations frame Tokyo as inclusive and equitable, actions by Koike's administration reveal abiding inequities. These efforts align with decades-long projects, most recently manifested in Society 5.0 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which prioritize market-driven growth while eras…
Scripting Addiction, Constraining Recovery: Alcoholism and Ideology in Japan
Japan’s medical establishment relies heavily on the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) in treating the nation’s addicts and alcoholics. Japanese individuals diagnosed as ‘alcohol dependent’ and trying to stay sober must embrace and fully incorporate a prescribed recovery ideology into their daily life. A.A. demands acceptance of alcoholism as a lifelong and incurable disease, requires belief in the possibility of a ‘spiritual transformation’…
Difficult Mornings
A Memory
Come down Here
Land abundance and cheap horsepower in the mechanization of the antebellum United States economy
Historical roots for ecological economics — Biophysical versus allocative approaches
Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science
Research Article| November 01 1989 Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science Paul P. Christensen Paul P. Christensen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1989) 21 (4): 689–709. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-21-4-689 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul P. Christensen; Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science. History of P…
The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry: 1914-1928
In this, the only full-length study of the visual poetry of the early twentieth century, Willard Bohn expertly illuminates the works of Apollinaire, Josep-Maria Junow, Guillermo de Torre, and others. His fascinating aesthetic insights bring to life this elusive and often misunderstood genre. An important contribution. Highly sophisticated, the study tends to raise its reader's impression of visual poetry in the twentieth century from trivial past…
Ecological economics: Economics, environment and society
Fire, motion, and productivity: The proto-energetics of nature and economy in François Quesnay
Chez nous, pour nous, tout est physique, et le moral en dérive.Quesnay in a marginal note to a text of Mirabeau (Weulersse 1910, 122)
The Passing of Anglo-America
The process of malting colonies out of other peoples' land involves, among other things, a certain amount of mythology, creation mythology, to overcome the moral revulsion of seizing property and deracinating an indigenous population. An ennobling aim is necessary, and the form such moves talce is usually the vision that a higher culture, a superior seed of human understanding, is being passed to an uncultured other. The notion lies close to rape…
Believing
Epicurean and Stoic Sources for Boisguilbert's Physiological and Hippocratic Vision of Nature and Economics
epicureanism, stoicism, Boisguilbert
With a Bible and a Gun
With a Bible and a Gun Paul Christensen (bio) It was for a worthy cause, all the killing, the torture, the rape of the women who ran for their lives down the paths, and through the woods. We shot the children, too. And then the ponies tied to the saplings by the creek. We killed until our hands were numb, and our trigger fingers bled. That is the way the west was won, with a bible and a gun. When we came back and drank in the saloon, and shot eac…
Hiking at Burrito Canyon
Hiking at Burrito Canyon Paul Christensen (bio) All night tossing in bed, the heat pushing the ceiling down on me, I defined my connection to God: a divinity who grows in the not-seen, like the furniture that recedes from a dark bedroom, present by its absence. That comfort, so practical in daylight, becomes the boundless ease on which the soul surrenders all its gravity, and floats upward in the night to those invisible arms. Meister Eckhardt fo…
Real Men Don't Hold Their Liquor: The Complexity of Drunkenness and Sobriety in a Tokyo Bar
This paper looks at the performance of drunkenness among primarily male patrons at a bar in an upscale Tokyo neighborhood. I look at how my experience working as a bartender and observing the drunken, sober, and sometimes performative behavior of customers initially clashed with my preconceptions of gender norms surrounding alcohol consumption—specifically the notion that to properly perform as a male drinker one must be able to ‘hold one’s liquo…
Darvish in Texas: Haafu identity and athletic celebrity
In early December 2011 the Nippon Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) "posted" Yu Darvish, making him eligible to field contract offers from Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the United States. Darvish, a tall, handsome then 24 year old who, from 2005-2011, was the team's ace pitcher, had been the frequent subject of speculation: would he, and if so when, leave Japan for American baseball. By December 19 the Texas Rangers had wo…
Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo
Depictions of an alcohol-saturated Japan populated by intoxicated salarymen, beer dispensing vending machines, and a generally tolerant approach to public drunkenness, typify domestic and international perceptions of Japanese drinking. Even the popular definitions of Japanese masculinity are interwoven with accounts of personal alcohol consumption in public settings; gender norms that exclude and marginalize the alcoholic. And yet the alcoholic a…
Connoisseurship and drunkenness in Tokyo
Scripting Addiction, Constraining Recovery: Alcoholism and Ideology in Japan
Japan’s medical establishment relies heavily on the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) in treating the nation’s addicts and alcoholics. Japanese individuals diagnosed as ‘alcohol dependent’ and trying to stay sober must embrace and fully incorporate a prescribed recovery ideology into their daily life. A.A. demands acceptance of alcoholism as a lifelong and incurable disease, requires belief in the possibility of a ‘spiritual transformation’…
The program is perfect
This article examines Narcotics Anonymous (NA) membership in two ways: how blame for failure is displaced from the 'perfect' organizational program and onto the individual addict working to remain sober and how this displacement is accompanied by notions of individual responsibility and work. These discourses illustrate the influence of a neoliberal outlook on the life course among 'clean' NA members, particularly as the social safety net in the …
Better Must Come: Existing Homelessness in Two Global Cities
Homelessness is a tragic yet ubiquitous aspect of urban life across the US and a less overt but nonetheless visible part of daily life in Japan’s major cities. Equally present is the ability of middle- and upper-class Americans and Japanese to frequently and collectively ignore, dismiss, or explain away homelessness as an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of city life under capitalism. For many reading this in San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto, or a…
Non-National Bodies in a National Pastime: Japan, Baseball, and the Manufacturing of Difference
Baseball occupies a privileged position as Japan’s most popular sport, commanding ample attention across numerous levels and contexts of play. Baseball’s popularity has also inspired value-laden and sometimes nationalistic language around its athletes and how the sport is played. These associations, linking baseball and its athletes to the Japanese nation today, arise in a diverse sporting landscape where transnational movement by athletically gi…
The recovery revolution
A New Reading of the Damonon Stele
Fake Meets Soul: Division Among Hawai'i's Japanese Surfers
This article examines the Japanese surf community in and around Honolulu, Hawai'i. I argue that a variety of factors, notably socioeconomic status and access to wealth, interpretation of popular media depictions that surround surfing, and a desire to project a 'cool' bodily image, result in division within this community between those labeled as either 'fake' or 'soul' surfers. A division exacerbated by anger and frustration among Japanese soul s…
Psychology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Art (9 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · History (6 works) · Japanese History and Culture (6 works)