DIJ social scientist Celia Spoden was awarded the Mark Bookman Prize by the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) association for her presentation  “Avatar Robots as an Alter Ego: New Opportunities for Work or Technological Fixes?” at the joint Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS)/AJJ conference in Kobe. Drawing on fieldwork in Tokyo’s DAWN Avatar Robot Café and on interviews with people with disabilities who remotely control an avatar robot from their homes and serve the guests in the cafe, Celia’s paper explores her interlocutor’s motivations and experiences working through the avatar, their perceptions of social participation, work, and disability, and how these perceptions have changed using the avatar. It shows how the avatar robots open up new opportunities for social participation, lead to a feeling of independence and belonging, and challenge common understandings of “disability.” The prize is named after the late Mark Bookman, who was an emerging scholar and a leading authority on disability issues in Japan, and is designed to boost the career of a gifted young scholar researching people with disabilities or other minority groups in Japan.