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Dr Christopher Chapman

Christopher

Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Email: christopher.chapman@ntu.edu.sg

Profile

I am an anthropologist and sociologist by training, with interests broadly in health and medicine in the Asia-Pacific. My research focuses on how people care for each other and how these practices intersect with biomedical and social service systems. My current project is on caregiving, trauma, and welfare reform in Japan’s child protection system. Outside of research, I am active in community-based child welfare advocacy. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about my work.

Research

Publications

Chapman, Christopher. 2025. “Yuri’s Story: Memory, Relational Healing, and the Reflexive Logics of Art Therapy in Japanese Clinical Psychology.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-025-09916-5

Chapman, Christopher. 2025. “Yusuke’s Story: Journey, Precarity, and Coming of Age in Care.” Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381251317819

Chapman, Christopher. 2025. “Reifying Risk and Health: Cultural Normativity, Bureaucracy, and Moral Quandary in Child Abuse Investigations in Japan.” Children and Youth Services Review 170, 108135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2025.108135

Chapman, Christopher. 2024. “The Orange Ribbon and the Pitiful Child: Investigating Child Abuse, Family Normativity and the Welfare State in Japan.” Children & Society 39(2): 568-578. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12934

Chapman, Christopher. 2024. “Authority, Embodied Teaching, and Liminal Education in Japanese Child Welfare: Between Abuse and Discipline.” NEOS 16 (1). https://acyig.americananthro.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NEOS-Spring24-Chapman.pdf

Chapman, Christopher. 2023. “Narrative Storywork: A Visual and Material Approach to Ethnographic Portraiture with Children in Care.” NEOS 15 (2). https://acyig.americananthro.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/NEOS-Fall23-CHAPMAN.pdf

Chapman, Christopher. 2023. “Affinity through Vulnerability: The Politics of Positionality in Child Welfare.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 10 (1): 1-9. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.6892

Expertise

Medical Anthropology & Sociology; Care; Personhood; Institutions; Inequality; Mental Health; Social Welfare; Ethnography & Multimodal Methods; Asia-Pacific
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