Rate My Professor Yuki Watanabe

Dr. Yuki Watanabe is a Senior Lecturer in the Media, Film and Communication programme within the Humanities Division at the University of Otago. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Kansas. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked in television broadcasting in Japan as a cast member on a nationally broadcast weekly television show by NHK for two years and as an assistant director at a local NHK station. She also gained experience in television and radio in the United States. At Otago, she leads MFCO 102 Media, Power, Society and MFCO 318 Indigenous Media. In addition to her academic roles, she serves as a board member for Volleyball Otago and Te Tio Kiorangi / Blue Oyster Art Project Space.

Dr. Watanabe's research centers on the interplay between culture and technology, particularly Asian popular culture, social media, and electronic communication. Her interests encompass contemporary popular culture, gender and media including femininity and masculinity, popular culture in Asia, political economy of media, intercultural communication, and the use of technology in instruction. She adopts an interdisciplinary and pluralistic methodological approach, integrating techniques from sociology, cultural studies, communication studies, feminist scholarship, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory, with a focus on media effects on social interaction in contexts like anime, manga, and K-pop. Notable recent activities include her role in an international collaboration on deepfakes led by the University of Western Australia, where she assesses deepfake technology understanding among New Zealand secondary school media studies teachers to enhance media literacy. She organized the Deepfakes & Society: A Humanities' Approach to the Technology Symposium in November 2025. Key publications include "Caption Literacy" (2025, with A. Alm, Palgrave Encyclopedia of Computer-Assisted Language Learning), "Language Teaching in Transition: Educator Perspectives on Integrating Machine Translation Tools in Tertiary Contexts" (2025, with A. Alm), "Vocabulary Learning with Netflix: Exploring Intraformal Learning Practices through the Lens of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory" (2025, with A. Alm), and conference contributions such as "Navigating Borders through House, Home and Homeland: Stories of Pan-Asian Diaspora Women in Kāinga (2022)" (2026).