Autumn 2016 seminars at SOAS

Here are the seminars announced for the Autumn 2016 season at SOAS.

Check www.soas.ac.uk/koreanstudies/events/ for updates.

More details on the individual seminars below

Typewriters vs. Coffee: How Did Korean Women Take over the Job of Secretaries?

Dr. Eunju Bährisch (Warwick University)
30 September 2016, 5:15 PM – 7:00 PM
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Abstract

Historically, both in the West and Korea, secretary was a male job. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, female secretaries began to appear and soon after they predominated in the job. A German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, argues that the cause of the gender transformation in the secretary job market was triggered by the invention and popularisation of a “typewriter.” Kittler’s observation is well applied to the West, both the U.S. and European employment history, however, it does not explain how Korean women took over the secretary job. In this research, I suggest that “coffee service,” which derived from traditional kisaeng, or a Korean geisha, culture required women at the office for their male co-workers. In order to support my arguments, I compare the duties of early secretaries between the West and Korea as well as the meaning of coffee service in Western office culture and Korean office culture. Throughout my research, different causes of the birth of female secretaries in the West and Korea and the problems caused by the origin and the very nature of secretary work in Korea will be investigated.

Speaker Biography

Eunju Bahrisch is Associate Fellow in Sociology and a research assistant in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Previously, she worked as a lecturing professor at the Institute of Korean Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her main research interest is comparative cultural studies between Europe and Korea. Another interest is employment history in Korea including female occupations in Korea, office culture and the glass ceiling/wall. She welcomes any chance of joint research in these fields. She can be contacted at [email protected]

Maths and Maps: Aggregate Variation in Korean

Simon Barnes-Sadler (SOAS, University of London)
7 October 2016, 5:15 PM – 7:00 PM
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Abstract

In common with every other human language, Korean varies over the area in which it is spoken. This variation has been much studied and recorded over the twentieth century and a certain amount of it has been mapped in the Linguistic Atlas of Korea. This great achievement in Korean dialectology is the result of over thirty years of careful data gathering which allows us to examine the distribution of the linguistic forms of 152 words over the territory of the contemporary Republic of Korea. While such data are interesting in themselves, the recent development of computational techniques in the study of linguistic variation allows us to approach these data at a high level of abstraction in order to gain new insights into geo-linguistic patterns of variation in South Korea.

In this talk, I first provide an outline the techniques of traditional ‘isogloss’ based dialectology and its results in Korea before going on to introduce contemporary ‘aggregate’ techniques, so-called ‘dialectometry’. I then present a range of visualisations of linguistic variation in the ROK before discussing in detail the contribution of these ‘aggregate’ techniques to re-addressing the question of the division of the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding islands into dialect areas.

Speaker Biography

Simon Barnes-Sadler developed an interest in Korean while studying Germanic and Slavonic languages. After a year spent teaching English in South Korea, he returned to the UK to complete his post-graduate education in Korean Studies at SOAS, University of London during which time he has published and presented papers on diaspora varieties of Korean, quantitative approaches to variation in Korean and Korean writing systems. He continues to investigate these topics as a Research Fellow at the CKS.

From Across the Genkai Sea: Chang Hyŏk-chu and Japan’s Korean War

Dr. Samuel E. Perry (Brown University)
14 October 2016, 5:15 PM – 7:00 PM
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Abstract

Perhaps no country profited more from the Korean War than did Japan, where the booming procurement industry reinvigorated Japan’s broken economy and whose return of independence was negotiated with the US at the very height of Korean War devastation. Long seen as “someone else’s war” in Japan, the Korean War was in fact the object of intense literary and journalistic speculation, comprising an extensive discourse now being reassessed by scholars challenging the myth of a “postwar” Japan. This talk focuses on the writings of the Korean-turned-Japanese writer Chang Hyŏk-chu, who like many Koreans in Japan took particular interest in the horrific fratricidal war taking place in his homeland, but stood in a place quite at odds with the majority of Koreans living in Japan. It places Chang’s writings within the literary and historical context of the early 1950s with a focus on how his works about gender and ethnicity helped to naturalize narratives about the Japanese nation that were politically constructed.

Clash or Coalition? Queer Korean Activism and Academic Research

JaeWook Ryu (Lancaster University); Hsien Chew (Proud Voices Asia); Julie Lee (UC Berkeley); Marion Gilbert (INALCO); Minwoo Jung (University of Southern California)
21 October 2016, 5:15 PM – 8:00 PM
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Summary

The concept for this event is to allow both activist and academic researchers (as well as individuals actively engaging in both) to meet and initially present their work. Invitees will then discuss as a roundtable the conflicts, positive developments, and questions that arise when activism and academia meet ‘queer’ in the Korean context. It will also seek to address how activism and academia deal with ‘queer’ and its origins in the English language, the west, as well as queer theory’s western foundations. The audience will then be invited to ask questions and contribute to this dialogue.

Programme

17:00 – 17:15	Introductions
17:15 – 17:35	JaeWook Ryu: KimJho, GwangSoo: film making and queer movement in Korea
17:35 – 17:55	Julie Lee: Queer Kinship in Korean Division Literature
17:55 – 18:15	Marion Gilbert: Female Homosexuality in South Korea an empirical study of the boundaries of categorising
18:15 – 18:35	Hsien Chew: Singing from the same (hymn) sheet? Asian queer choral activism and Korean exceptionalism
18:35 – 18:55	Minwoo Jung: Mobilizing international human rights discourses, mobilizing morals in South Korean LGBTQ Activism
19:00 – 19:55	Roundtable Discussion and Q&A
19:55 – 20:00	Closing Remarks

Participant Biographies

JaeWook Ryu is a current PhD student conducting film studies research at Lancaster University. JaeWook received three bachelor degrees in information systems, communication and advertisement and completed his Masters degree in film studies at Dongguk University. He acquired an MBA degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now, he is looking into the politics of Korean queer cinema and is interested in various Korean transformational contents adopting webtoons, which means web-based cartoons in Korea.

Julie Lee is an undergraduate student and research fellow studying English and Korean literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In early 2016, she was a workshops committee co-chair and film coordinator for the Queer and Asian Conference (QACON) and a participant of the Korean Literature Translation Workshop. Her essay “Utopian Potentialities of Queer Smoke in Bruce Nugent’s ‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade'” was published in The Folio. Born in Daegu, she speaks California English and Busan satori.

Marion Gilbert has two bachelor degrees in Korean Studies (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris) and in Human and Social Sciences (University of Paris Descartes, Paris). She has completed a Masters degree in Korean Studies at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and her thesis is about power relations that go through sexual minorities in Seoul. She studied at Kyung-Hee University (Seoul, South Korea) and Kim Il-sung University (Pyongyang, North Korea) as an exchange student. She also joined the translation workshop organized by the Korean Literature Translation Institute at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris in 2014. She translated Yangǔi mirae by Hwang Jeong-eun and, in 2015, Ǒnǔ sǒnǔlhan haoǔi pinjipt’ǒli by Hae Yisoo. She is interested in gender studies, social relations in the Three Koreas and in subtitling movies and documentaries.

Hsien Chew is the founder of Proud Voices Asia, the network of LGBT choirs in Asia, which aims to bring queer choruses in the region together for mutual support and information exchange. A graduate of Oxford University and SOAS, and a practising medical doctor, he started the group in 2012 as a hobby which now encompasses nearly 30 choirs in nine countries. In 2015, Proud Voices Asia and G-Major Chorus from Taiwan organised ‘Hand in Hand’, the first Asian LGBT choir festival, in Taipei. Hsien is interested in LGBT community choral music and performance as queer activism, and the experience of two Korean choirs – G-Voice and Unnie Choir – illustrates how this may be modified by local legal and cultural constraints. The next Hand in Hand festival will take place in Seoul in 2017.

Minwoo Jung is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Southern California. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Seoul National University, where he was valedictorian of the department. Before coming to USC, he was a research fellow at the Korean Oral History Research Center in Seoul. His research interests include culture, political sociology, gender/sexuality, and globalization. His previous research examined the uneven effects of neoliberal shifts in housing and family policies on young adults living in South Korea. His dissertation project focuses on how different state regimes shape and respond to newly emerging public identities based on sexuality and gender difference. His ethnographic research in three Asian countries uses an innovative comparative research design to link cultural questions and international topics in citizenship and political change.

73 Years On – ‘Comfort Women’ Shown on Film

Jung-lae Cho (Director, Spirits’ Homecoming), Sook Son (Actress, Spirits Homecoming), Hana Kang (Actress, Spirits Homecoming)
28 October 2016, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Spirits’ Homecoming, a film about “comfort women” will be screened as part of the London East Asia Film Festival programme on 27th October at Regent Street Cinema in association with Pan Asian Women’s Association (PAWA). In connection with the screening, the director and the two main actresses of the film will take part in this seminar to talk about the making of a film that expresses the hardship of these women. There will be a Q&A session for the audience to ask questions after the opinions offered from the panel.

The speakers will discuss the issue revolved around so-called “comfort women” including the conscious problem in the writing of history and the unresolved issues related to the “comfort women” at present. During the talk, parts of ‘Spirits’ Homecoming’ will be shown, however, the full film will be shown for the first time in Europe the day before the seminar takes place.

About Spirits Homecoming

In 1943, the 14-year-old innocent ‘Jung-min’ (Kang Hana) had no clue when she was dragged by the Japanese soldiers away from her family. ‘Jung-min’ is thrown into a train, along with many more children including ‘Young-hee’ (Seo Miji), and heads to a clueless place. During the Second World War, ‘Jung-min’ and other children are thrown out in the cold battlefield. Japanese soldiers were waiting for them where they only received terrible agony and pain.

Spirits’ Homecoming is a crowd-sourced South Korean film directed by Cho Jung-Lae about ‘Comfort Women’ during the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1943. This is a film that 75,200 people donated to in order to be made; they also petitioned for increased circulation at cinemas in South Korea.

Son in Law of a Political Theocracy: The Rise and Fall of Jang Seongtaek

Ra Jong-Yil (Former Republic of Korea Ambassador to UK and Japan; Distinguished Professor Hanyang and Cachon University)
2 November 2016, 6:15 – 7:30 pm
Russell Square College Buildings Djam Lecture Theatre

A Conversation with Director Kim Sung-soo and Actor Jung Woo-sung

Kim Sung-soo (Director) and Jung Woo-sung (Actor)
4 November 2016, 5:30 – 7:00 pm
Russell Square College Buildings: Khalili Lecutre Theatre

Summary

Action-noir Asura: The City of Madness took Korean screens by storm in the summer and at the London Korean Film Festival the film will make its eagerly awaited European debut. Before the film premieres this evening its star and director are here to give a special talk on their long-standing collaborative relationship.

Asura is director Kim Sung-soo’s most accomplished film to date, a brooding, atmospheric masterpiece where cops, criminals and corrupt politicians fight for survival against the backdrop of a shady megalopolis. Kim’s been turning out blockbusters for over two decades now, with his maturation as a director being mirrored by actor Jung Woo-sung’s own transformation from simmering youth icon to one of the country’s hottest leading men.

The pair first collaborated on the cusp of the Korean New Wave with Beat (1997), followed swiftly by City of the Rising Sun (1999). A showcase for the talents of both star and director these action-filled crime dramas would set the template for such films in the coming decade. Their next project, historical epic Musa – The Warrior (2001), was groundbreaking in scale and ambition; the Wave had broken, and Jung and Kim have been at the forefront of Korea’s innovative blockbuster filmmaking ever since.

Kim Sung-soo and Jung Woo-sung Collaborative Filmography

• Beat (1997)
• City of the Rising Sun (1998)
• Musa – The Warrior (2001)
• Asura: The City of Madness (2016)

Sejong Institute Cultural Event: Let’s Dance ‘Gang Gang Sullae’

Instructor: JeungHyun Choi
18 November 2016, 6:30 – 8:50 pm
Paul Webley Wing (Senate House) Room S116

Summary

• Origin of ‘Gang Gang Sullae’
• Screening of the dance video
• How to dance ‘Gang Gang Sullae’ and sing the ‘Gang Gang Sullae’ song
• Dancing and playing

Shaman Ritual Performances from Korea’s Honeymoon Island, Jeju

Master Shaman Soon-sil Seo and Kut Ritual performance group MARO
21 November 2016, 8:00 – 9:00 pm
Russell Square College Buildings Room DLT
Type of Event: Performance

Jeju shaman Soon-sil Seo is a master shaman and president of Jeju K’eun Kut, the 13th Jeju Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Organiser: SOAS Korean Musica Society in association with SOAS Centre of Korean Studies.

The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, 1876-1905

Prof. Sheila Jager
25 November 2016, 5:15 PM – 7:00 PM
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Abstract

This talk briefly chronicles the “Other” Great Game in East Asia that took place at the close of the nineteenth century when China, Japan and Russia fought over the impoverished but strategically important Korean peninsula. A late comer to the imperialist age, Korea had stubbornly and successfully fought off all efforts by foreign powers to penetrate her borders. When she was finally pried opened by Japan in 1876, the rapidly developing connections and competition for control over the peninsula transformed East Asia. Korea became an enduring international security conundrum and the regional instability that ensued not only fractured the previous international harmony within the Confucian world, but provided Western countries with both the incentive and opportunity to intervene more vigorously in East Asian affairs. From this globalization of politics the modern East Asian order was born, with results that affect international relations in the region to this day.

Speaker Biography

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is a Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She was also a visiting Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in 2006-8. Her first book, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (M.E. Sharpe, 2003), focused on Korean nationalism and how particular gendered tropes have had a persistent and pervasive life in the fashioning of Korean modernity. Her second book, an edited volume (with Rana Mitter) entitled Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2007), explored how the major East Asian states underwent a profound reassessment of their experiences from World War II to Vietnam following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Her third book, Brothers At War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (W.W. Norton/Profile Books, 2013), was a military, political and cultural history of the war, seen as spanning from 1945 to the present, and its global impact told from the American, North and South Korean, Soviet/Russian, and Chinese perspectives. It was selected for the 2013 National Book Festival and as one of Foreign Affairs 2013 best book on Asia-Pacific. She is currently working on a new book about the Great Power struggle over the Korean peninsula at the end of the 19th and early 20th century.

P’ansori Workshop with Min Hye Sung

Min Hye Sung (p’ansori performer)
28 November 2016, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Russell Square College Buildings Room 4429

Min Hye Sung, a p’ansori performer who has been recognized as ‘isuja’ (transmitter) of the p’ansori story ‘Hŭngbuga,’ will perform pieces from the p’ansori repertoire, as well as speaking of her life as a p’ansori performer.

Organiser: Jointly hosted by the Korean Pansori Society and the SOAS Centre of Korean Studies.

Seventeenth Century Japan -Hogok Nam Yong-ik’s Pusangnok-

Prof. Youngsook Pak
2 December 2016, 5:15 – 7:00pm
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Abstract

Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康 1543-1616) made great effort to reinstate diplomatic relations with Chosŏn after the breakdown following the Hideyoshi invasion in 1592. Untangling the obstructions and the deep-seated Korean suspicion towards the Japanese took time. Gradually diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed. Political stabilization in Edo Japan, mutual respect and cultural exchanges enabled peaceful relations until the last official delegation to Japan in 1811.

The Korean envoys to China and Japan were selected among the high-ranking scholar officials. The documents of their journey in the form of diaries, letters and poems provide unrivalled first-hand information on the countries they visited. Pusangnok 扶桑錄, Record of the Journey to Japan, by the talented young scholar official Hogok Nam Yong-ik, stands out, and is the basis for this lecture. As Chongsagwan 從事官 (Junior 6th rank) Hogok went to Edo Japan in 1655. His perceptive observations provide a vivid picture of seventeenth-century Japan in regard to landscape, economy, architecture, material culture and people. This lecture was given in August 2016 as the keynote speech at the biennial international conference of NAJAKS (Northern Association of Japanese and Korean Studies).

Speaker Biography

Youngsook Pak studied Sinology, East Asian and Western Art History at Universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, Köln, and Harvard where she had great teachers: Dietrich Seckel, Roger Goepper, John Rosenfield, Anselm Riedl and Hans Belting. PhD in Heidelberg on Koryŏ and Early Chosŏn Kshitigarbha Images. Taught as Professor of Korean Art History at SOAS, Heidelberg, Yale, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. At SOAS, she established Korean art history, making SOAS the first western university to teach this subject. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of Seoul Journal of Korean Studies (Seoul National University) and Journal of Korean Art and Archaeology (National Museum of Korea). She has organized international conferences at SOAS and Yale, and acted as Korean art adviser to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The British Museum and the Musée Guimet in Paris. Numerous publications on Korean art and architecture from the Three Kingdoms, Koryŏ and Chosŏn period. Currently working on the edited volume on Esoteric Buddhism and Buddhist Artin China and Korea, and the monograph Korean Art, Space and Time.

International Migration, Migrant Integration, and Multiculturalism in South Korea

Prof. In-Jin Yoon (Korea University)
9 December 2016, 5:15 – 7:00pm
Brunei Gallery Room B102

Abstract

Immigration in South Korea used to refer to emigration, outward migration of South Koreans abroad, but since the late 1980s South Korea became an immigrant receiving country. In December 2015, the number of foreign residents reached 1.9 million, accounting for 3.7% of the Korean population. Several distinctive features of immigration to South Korea are as follows: (1) the majority of immigrants are returning ethnic Koreans, especially from China and the CIS, (2) the largest type of immigrants are short-term contract and low-skilled workers, (3) the number and proportion of undocumented immigrants are small and under the strong government control, (4) Korean people and society are closed-minded to refugees and asylum seekers, and (5) religious minorities (e.g., Muslims) are few and not visible. For the above reasons, immigration does not have a significant impact on South Korean society yet, and multiculturalism is not an issue of social division and conflict as we can observe in Western Europe.

While multiculturalism lost popular support in Europe, it gained public interest and policy attention in Northeast Asia, particularly in South Korea since the 1990s. The rapid increase of immigrants and the urgent need for accommodating new members of society and helping them integrate into mainstream society were the main reasons for the sudden interest in multiculturalism. The Korean approach to multiculturalism has several distinctive characteristics. First, the Korean government’s policies and programs regarding immigrants are oriented toward migrant integration rather than multiculturalism. Their main goal is to assist immigrants to adapt to Korean society with little attention to their cultural rights. Second, the main targets or beneficiaries of the government’s migrant integration policy are people in international marriages and their children. Migrant workers, who account for a larger share of immigrants in Korea, are not considered a major clientele of migrant integration programs. Ethnic Chinese, who have lived in Korean soil for many generations, are not even considered as a relevant target group that the government needs to take care of. Third, most migrant integration policies and programs aim at assimilating immigrants to Korean culture and society rather than accepting cultures and identities of immigrant groups. Fourth, the Korean people and society as a whole are pretty sympathetic toward immigrants, especially toward female marriage migrants and their children. Because of the general public’s positive and benevolent attitudes toward immigrants, the Korean government allocated a generous budget for migrant integration programs. Finally, the Korean government has dealt with specific multicultural minority groups by legislating specific laws and policies for each group. This group-specific approach toward migrant integration has not only created fissures among migrants, but has also antagonism and conflict among migrants and locals. It will be difficult to obtain the consent of ordinary citizens and to continue operating special group-specific policies. Thus, the government policy should become more universal in its principle and application and try to strengthen the overall national capacity to protect all people at risks rather than targeting specific groups of people.

Despite frequent use of ‘multiculturalism’ in public discourse and government policy, the Korean government has pursued migrant integration rather than multiculturalism from the outset. The use of term ‘multiculturalism’ is almost rhetoric and disguises strong pressure for assimilation to Korean culture and society. Although South Korea is far behind multiculturalism, it seems to have adopted too prematurely Western Europe’s discourse of multicultural backlash and policy of civic integration of immigrants. Unlike Western European countries that face serious challenges of social division along racial and ethnic lines, South Korea has not the same problem of the lack of integration of immigrants. The actual problem is too much pressure for assimilation and little tolerance and recognition of cultural diversity and cultural rights of immigrants. South Korea has more room for tolerance of immigrants and their social and cultural rights. Ordered immigration of economically active and socially responsible foreigners and their successful integration into host society can provide new engine for growth when its native population is declining and aging.

Speaker Biography

In-Jin Yoon is professor of the Department of Sociology, Korea University and the former presidents of the Association for North Korean Migrants Studies and the Association for the Studies of Koreans Abroad. He is currently the vice director of the Asiatic Research Institute at Korea University. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago and taught at the Asian American Studies Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is now the vice director of the Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University and the principal investigator of the Central Hub Project Group for Overseas Koreans Studies.

His major publications include On My Own: Korean Businesses and Race Relations in America, Korean Diaspora: Migration, Adaptation, and Identity of Overseas Koreans,and North Korean Migrants: Lives, Consciousness, and Support Policy for Resettlement, South Koreans’ Perceptions of Migrant Workers and Multicultural Society, and Migration and Transnational Space in Northeast Asia, Mutual Perceptions of North Korean Migrants and South Koreans, Trends and Tasks of Studies of Koreans Abroad, and the History of Koreas Abroad, History of Overseas Koreans, International Migration and Multiculturalism in Northeast Asia, Reflections on Multiculturalism in Korea and Its Prospects, and Korean Identity: Changes and Continuity.

His research interests include social psychology, minorities, overseas Koreans and Korean diaspora, international migration, and multiculturalism. His email address is [email protected] and [email protected]