Iori has a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary background, holding a B.A. in Education from Sophia University in Tokyo, an M.A. in Applied Communication from RMIT University and a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from the University of Melbourne. She came to Australia in 2006 as a recipient of the Endeavour Japan Awards funded by the Australian Government. She  joined Japanese Studies at Monash University in 2019.

Iori is also the author of six commercial books about intercultural communications, language learning and Japanese food culture. Some of her books were translated and sold in Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.

Her expertise lies in a wide array of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research areas, encompassing diverse topics, all interconnected by the common theme of social inclusion. Some of these areas include labour migration, precarious work, gender equality, food and sustainability, and innovative education. With a specific emphasis on Japan and Australia, her work has revolved around exploring how ideas impact individuals' transnational experiences, which are shaped by factors like culture, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, social status, geographical location and other variables.

In 2019, Iori was awarded the Institute of Social Science and Oxford University Press Prize for her co-authored journal article titled ‘Silent Exits: Risk and Post-3.11 Skilled Migration from Japan to Australia’.

In her monograph ‘The Japanese Restaurant: Tasting the New Exotic in Australia’ (2023, Routledge), Iori shows how the Japanese restaurant operates as a cultural hub of building a diverse and connected community of migrants, Australian citizens and international tourists, and supporting the dissemination of knowledge and practices of Japanese culinary cultures. She also presents the ethnographic evidence that unsettles colonialist and essentialist understandings of the exotic and ‘Japanese-ness’ as the West’s ‘inferior Other’. Her multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary background sustains the book’s critical investigation into fixed notions of otherness, race, ethnicity and authenticity. The research attests to her innovative application of conceptual frameworks, including Gilles Deleuze’s ‘fold’, Naoki Sakai’s ‘homolingual/heterolingual addresses’, Rey Chow’s ‘coercive mimeticism’ and Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’. These theories allowed her to offer new perspectives on a competing social mechanism in which the Japanese restaurant both inhabits and challenges the values of inclusion, diversity and equality in Australia’s predominately ‘white’ yet increasing ‘Asianising’ market.

Current research projects:  

Iori is currently involved in several collaborative and independent research projects that center around social inclusion, precarious labor, migration, and gender equality in both Australia and Japan.

In addition to these projects, she is leading a book project that investigates Japanese migration to Australia alongside leading migration scholars from both Australia and Japan.

She is currently completing an inddividual research project ‘The Platform Economy in Asia-Pacific’ funded by the Faculty Support Package: Publication Assistance for Carers and COVID Impacted Researchers. The major purpose of the research is to identify and address the impact of platform working environments on the wellbeing of platform workers, including the so called ‘gig workers’.

As a partner researcher, Iori was part of the 2022-23 Australia-Japan Foundation project team, which consisted of over 20 internationally acclaimed scholars focusing on gender equality, including the Monash Gender Family Violence Prevention Centre research team.

In addition to the listed publications, Iori's latest works include:

Hamada, I. (2023). 'The Japanese Restaurant: Tasting the New Exotic in Australia'. Routledge.

Hamada, I. (2023). 'Double Truth: Employment Insecurity and Gender Inequality in Japan's Neoliberal Promotion of Side Jobs'. Japan Forum.

 In 2021, Iori was awarded a Fellowship of Higher Education Academy (FHEA) by the Advance of Higher Education, UK.

She is currently working on several educational/pedagogical projects, and one of them involves the production of an online textbook titled Japanese Introductory 1. The project is funded by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL).

The textbook integrates a holistic and nuanced picture of Japanese language and culture, including the Ainu indigenous language and culture, into systematic and authentic language learning content that suits tertiary curricula in Australia and elsewhere. The goals of the textbook are thus to offer:

• accessible, holistic, in-depth and contemporary resources that can help adult learners and educators of Japanese language situated in diverse educational environments learn and teach better;
• an innovative pedagogical platform that can help learners take ownership of their learning and challenge their worldviews by comfortably encountering their own and others’ differences;
• an alternative tool to learn and teach the target language and culture that can easily be accommodated to meet the needs of tertiary Japanese language programs in Australia and elsewhere;
• a diverse, inclusive and equitable approach to Japanese language learning and teaching.

Iori contextualises these goals within the framework of ‘decolonising the curriculum’, by which she means offering a resource and curriculum that encourages both learners and educators to become more inclusive, more interculturally responsive and more rigorous in their ability to situate their knowledge about and relationship with the target language and culture in time, space and power.

Iori conducts research on a wide range of topics, incuding labour migration, gender equality, precarious work (e.g. unpaid domestic work and platform economy), food cultures and sustainability, as well as innovative education (e.g. Online Intercultural Exchange [OIE]) and language learning. She welcomes inquiries from students seeking postgraduate supervision in these areas.