On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis

This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of “core location,” a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and “Asia as method,” a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways in which a place can be studied in an increasingly globalized world. Examining cases set in the Jeju English Education City, anti-poverty and community activist sites, rural areas home to large numbers of migrant women, and Korea’s Chinatowns, greenbelts, and textile factories, the collection develops a relational understanding of a place as a constellation of local and global forces and processes that interact and contradict in particular ways. Each chapter also explores multiple modes of urban marginality and discusses how understanding them shapes the methods of academic praxis for social justice causes and decolonialized scholarship. This book is the outcome of several years of interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogues among scholars based in geography, architecture, anthropology, and urban politics.

Jesook Song is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Laam Hae is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at York University.

Contents

Introduction: Core Location, Asia as Method, and a Relational Understanding of Places | Laam Hae, York University and Jesook Song, University of Toronto

1. The Idea of Chinatown: Rethinking Cities from the Periphery | Sujin Eom, Dartmouth College
2. Seeing the Development of Jeju Global Education City from the Margins | Youjeong Oh, University of Texas at Austin
3. Against the Construction State: Korean Pro-Greenbelt Activism as Method | Laam Hae, York University
4. Marriage Migration as Spatio-Temporal Fix in Pohang’s Post-Industrial Urban Development through Saemaul | Hyeseon Jeong, University of Newcastle, Australia
5. “Locations of Reflexivity”: South Korean Community Activism and Its Affective Promise for “Solidarity” | Mun Young Cho, Yonsei University, South Korea
6. The Education Welfare Project at Pine Tree Hill: A Core Location to Assess Distributional and Transitional Forms of Justice | Jesook Song, University of Toronto
7. Situating the Space of Labour: Activism, Work, and Urban Regeneration | Seo Young Park, Scripps College

Afterword | Jesook Song, University of Toronto and Laam Hae, York University

Source: publisher’s website