Yasuhiro Okazawa

Yasuhiro Okazawa is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Cambridge. Before attending Cambridge, he studied economics at Kyoto University and sociology and media studies at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on how social sciences shape our ways of understanding and living with others. His PhD thesis studies the emergence of statistics in Victorian Britain through the examination of the activities of the Statistical Society of London, which pursued statistics as a collective scientific project of observing society since its establishment in 1834 until the mathematization of statistics. His thesis aims to answer the following three questions: how Victorian statistics shaped the theory and practices of statistical observation; how Victorian statistics created a field of knowledge that legitimized a specific form of social interventions; and what type of epistemic virtues Victorian statisticians followed. While conducting his own research project, Yasuhiro provides English-to-Japanese translations as a form of public engagement. His most recent translation work is a Japanese translation of the Society for the Social Studies of Science’s conference theme of 2018.