OUR FACILITATORS

Adair Linn Nagata, PhD

New York, New York, U.S.A., and Tokyo, Japan

• Bodymindfulness
• Transformative Learning
• Higher education
• Human development
• Developmental Mentor of PL Facilitators

PL work
Adair Linn Nagata, PhD, is an educator who teaches, facilitates, and coaches with an emphasis on integrative transformative learning through Personal Leadership.

She has taught intercultural communication and Personal Leadership at the university level in Japan and the U.S.A. since 2002. Since 2008, she has taught PL at the graduate-school level, both in the Master of Arts in Intercultural Relations (MAIR) program in Portland, Oregon, and at Waseda University Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies in Tokyo, Japan.

Other work
In Tokyo, Adair worked in international education and then in human resources for a global financial services company. Her leadership roles in that firm focused on corporate training, communication, and organizational development.

Adair is one of the past presidents and a Senior Fellow of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research–Japan (SIETAR–Japan), and has served as co-editor of their journal. She is also a member of the Global Advisory Board of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network.

In her communication work, Adair focuses on self-reflexivity. She coined the term bodymindfulness, which emerged while doing her dissertation about emotional resonance and presence utilizing phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical social theory, and the practice of mindfulness. Her publications emphasize the cultivation of consciousness and communicative competence both in human relations and for researchers working to elucidate abilities needed to bridge significant differences.

Personal background
Adair was raised in a mainstream U.S. monocultural, monolingual family and attended public schools in Chicago. She had significant cultural learning experiences about regional, class and academic differences while living in Massachusetts to attend Smith College and Harvard Graduate School of Education, and while teaching social studies in a Boston-area high school.

She married her Japanese husband in Boston in 1969. She lived in Tokyo continuously from 1970 to 2010, and is a Permanent Resident of Japan. She raised her two sons there as part of her husband’s extended family, which now also includes close relatives in Brazil, China, Korea, and the U.S.A.

Adair now lives most of the time in New York City where she is actively involved in raising her 11-year-old grandson. Both her personal and professional activities continue to provide many opportunities to practice her motto, "Peace begins within."

Academic
Adair earned her doctorate in Human Development from the Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California.

Other interests
She enjoys continuous learning, interacting with New Yorkers on public transportation, reading, and walking.