Margo Okasawa-Rey
Delivered on February 19, 1998 by Margo Okasawa-Rey, Ed.D
Margo Okazawa-Rey, EdD is Professor at the School of Social Work, San Francisco State University. She works in university, public school, and community settings addressing the issues of racism and other forms of oppression through activist scholarship, education, and political organizing. She is particularly interested in the problems affecting people of color, especially women of color.
Professor Okazawa-Rey's current research/activist project is examining the effects of the U.S. military presence on women and children in East Asia. This work includes examining the violence against women and children committed by GIs, documenting the experiences of mixed-race children, the offspring of GIs and Asian women, and analyzing the political organizing being done by local activists. Her interests in this topic developed while conducting research on the experiences of Amerasian children abandoned by their GI fathers in South Korea. That experience led to her expanding the work to include Okinawa, mainland Japan, the Philippines, and other locations in East Asia affected by past and current presence of the U.S. military.
In 1996, Professor Okazawa-Rey was awarded a grant from the Social Science Research Council to convene a planning meeting of researchers and activists currently addressing the effects of the U.S. military presence. It addressed the following areas: 1) violence against women and children, 2) treaties and agreements, 3) environmental effects, and 4) base conversion and economic development. Two outcomes of the meeting were the establishment of an international network and the formulation of a research agenda to document more systematically the relevant issues.