“Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945”

Alyssa Park (assistant professor, History, UI)
December 6, 2019  

Abstract:
In the late nineteenth century, Koreans suddenly began to cross the border to Russia and China by the thousands.  Their continuous mobility and settlement in the tripartite borderland made them an enduring topic of dispute between multiple countries (Korea, Russia, China, and Japan), and prompted a host of questions that concerned fundamental questions about states’ governance over people: Which country had the right to exercise authority over mobile people and where?  Who possessed the right to control their movements?  This talk brings the global phenomena of mobility and bordermaking into the microspace of Korea’s borderlands—specifically, the Maritime, the Russian side of a newly delineated border.  Moving away from scholarly debates centering on disputes over territory, this talk focuses on contests over people.  It examines why Koreans moved, what officials thought of them, and how they attempted to claim Koreans in their own states.  It also illuminates questions that emerge from engaging in transnational history projects in the East Asia and Russia contexts.  The talk draws from Alyssa Park’s recently published book, Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501738364/sovereignty-experiments/

Speaker:
Alyssa Park is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa.  Her research focuses on migration, borderlands, and transnational history in Korea and northeast Asia, including Russia.  Dr. Park received her A.B. from Princeton University and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

"The Political Economy of Media Framing in Korea: An Analysis of Korean News Coverage of Climate Change, 1995-2015"

Byung Wook Kim (Journalism and Mass Communication)
February 7, 2020

Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to understand the construction of the dominant climate change discourse in South Korea and the solution that is implied, which directs the society to embrace neoliberalism while practicing environmentalism. This study, specifically, aims to reveal what the dominant and preferred meanings of climate change in South Korea are and how these meanings have been constructed through Korean newspapers to serve the interests of the ruling coalition, mainly Korean conglomerates and foreign investors.

“Korean Young Generation and Their Priorities in Life”

Ji Hye Kim (Sociology)
March 6, 2020

Many of the young generation in South Korea have developed a pessimistic view on their lives and future. Due to the high level of unemployment and economic insecurity, the so-called ‘Sampo Generation’ has to prioritize personal success over such basic things in life as dating, marriage, and having children. This presentation examines how Korean adolescents perceive these trade-offs between life goals. The findings will show how patterned understandings of life goals are related to socioeconomic characteristics and later life-course outcomes.

"To Be Both Creator and Critic for Self-Cultivation: Aesthetic Thought of Pyoam Gang Sehwang (1713-1791)"

Speaker: Dr. Dobin Choi
October 9, 2020 (via Zoom)

This paper explores the development of aesthetic thought regarding painting in the late Joseon period with a focus on the artistic practice of a renowned literati painter Pyoam Gang Sehwang (표암(豹菴) 강세황(姜世晃), 1713-1791). Through a contextual investigation into the grounds of Pyoam’s artworks and criticisms, I aim to show how he harmonized various painting styles—from Southern School paintings (南宗画) to Western paintings—with Neo-Confucian tradition.

Bio:
Dobin Choi is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from The State University of New York at Buffalo, and his B.A./M.A. in Aesthetics from Seoul National University, South Korea. His researches center on comparative studies of the ethics and aesthetics of East and West.  

“Belonging Otherwise: Chinese Undergraduate Students at South Korean Universities”

Jiyeon Kang (Associate Professor, Communication Studies, University of Iowa)
February 26, 2021

Following the South Korean government’s drive in the 1990s for globalization and deregulation of higher education, Korean universities aggressively recruited Chinese students as both symbolic and economic resources. As a result, the number of Chinese students studying at Korean universities increased 57-fold between 2000 and 2019 (from 1,200 to 68,537). The presentation will share initial findings from the interviews with Chinese students, who chose South Korea with academic and cultural aspirations but often found that the university and Korean students did not welcome them into their classes or communities. The presentation will discuss modalities of “belonging otherwise,” or how these students make the study-abroad space inhabitable through transnational and technological networks of belonging. 

Bio:
Jiyeon Kang is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on youth culture, social movements, and digital technologies in both South Korea and the U.S., with a specific interest in the communicative dynamics and cultural norms emerging in internet and campus communities. 

“Seeing Asian American Life through the Video Essay”

Kevin Lee (Video Essayist)
September 23, 2021 7:00 p.m to 8:30 p.m

We will screen Lee's video essays, including Mourning with Minari and Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox (see descriptions below). Afterward, Lee will join Professors Hyaeweol Choi (Religious Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, UI), Jennifer Ho (Ethnic Studies and Center for Humanities and the Arts, University of Colorado–Boulder), and Corey Creekmur (Cinematic Arts, English, and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, UI) to discuss his video essay on Minari and Asian American experience. The discussion will be moderated by Teresa Mangum, Director of the UI Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and will consider the relationships among art, politics, and the uses of the video essay form to comment on and engage with current events, including traumatic events.

Dissertation Title: Viral and Visceral: Feminist Media and Art in Neocolonial South Korea

Soyi Kim 
Dissertation Workshop, November 12, 2021 (Virtual)

Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation, Viral and Visceral: Feminist Media and Art in Neocolonial South Korea, resituates contemporary South Korean and Korean diasporic feminist art and media within the histories of U.S. neocolonial and biomedical control and South Korea’s patriarchal nationalism. It analyzes, on the one hand, neocolonial violence rooted in the public health measures concerning Korean subaltern bodies, enforced bilaterally by the U.S. and Korean governments, and, on the other hand, contemporary feminist online activism and art that recognize and question this systemic violence. The feminists explore the visceral transformation of images of Korean women’s bodies and instigate public debates over gendered notions of contagious diseases and public health crises at large. They often do so coextensively with anti-colonial, anti-nationalist, and subaltern political movements. The tropes of virality and viscerality provide useful lenses for both material and metaphorical analyses of the transnational aesthetics of contemporary Korean feminism and its entanglement with neocolonial body politics.

Soyi Kim Bio:
Soyi Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society program at the University of Minnesota. As a Fulbright scholar, she received her Master’s degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Trained in cultural studies and art history, she is an interdisciplinary scholar of feminism, art, media, and public health discourse in neocolonial South Korea and the Korean diaspora. 

Reviewers:

Prof. Jin-Kyung Lee Bio:
Currently an associate professor of Korean and Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego, Jin-kyung Lee received her B. A. from Cornell University and her Ph. D. from UCLA in Comparative Literature. Her research interests include nationalist culture and politics of the colonial era, militarism and development in post-colonial South Korea, representations of gender and ethnicity, Asian labor migration in South Korea and Korean diaspora. She has authored a book, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea (2010), and coauthored Korean Literature, Literary Studies and Disciplinary Crossings: A Transpacific Comparative Examination (2013) and Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (2013).

Prof. Jin-Kyung Park Bio:
Currently a professor of Korean Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Jin-kyung Park received her B.A. from Sookmyung Women's University and her Ph.D from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Communications. Her research focuses on the history and cultural studies of empire, colonialism, gender, medicine and technology in twentieth-century Korea. She is currently working on book manuscripts entitled Yellow Men's Burden: Medicine and Biopolitics in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 and The Population Problem of the Two Koreas: Empire, (Post)colonialism, Nation-State in Modern Times.