Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at Fairfax County, Virginia, and Daechi-dong, Seoul, Korea, Korean Kirogi Families explores the dynamics of emplaced transnational families through analyses of the categories of social capital, sense of place, sense of belonging, and mothering among so-called “Korean kirogi families.” A Korean kirogi (wild goose) family is a distinct kind of transnational migrant family that splits their … [Read More]
Booklist: Education
Imaging Migration in Post-War Britain: Artists of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese Heritage
This book examines the artistic practices of a range of British-based artists of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese) heritage in order to consider the social, political and cultural effects of migration or diaspora upon their creative production. Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk demonstrates three themes: the multiplicity and expansive contemporaneity of these artists’ visual oeuvres; the … [Read More]
Korean Teachers
Winner of the Hankyoreh Literature Award, Seo Su-jin’s debut novel follows four Korean language lecturers at Seoul’s prestigious H University over the course of an academic year. Readers will spend one season with each of the four protagonists—Seon-yi in the spring, Mi-ju in the summer, Ga-eun in the autumn, and Han-hee in the winter—getting a … [Read More]
Education in South Korea: Reflections on a Seventy-Year Journey
From the publisher’s website: This book, the result of a landmark colloquium held in Korea to reflect on the role of education in Korean society, provides fascinating insights into the interplay of political evolution and pedagogy. Korea has gone from one of the world’s poorest societies after the Korean War to one of its richest, … [Read More]
Routledge Handbook of Contemporary South Korea
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary South Korea offers a ground-breaking study of the socio-political development of the Korean peninsula in the contemporary period. Written by an international team of scholars and experts, contributions to this book address key intellectual questions in the development of Korean studies, projecting new ways of thinking about how international systems … [Read More]
Korean Wild Geese Families: Gender, Family, Social, and Legal Dynamics of Middle-Class Asian Transnational Families in North America
From the publisher’s website: Korean Wild Geese Families: Gender, Family, Social, and Legal Dynamics of Middle-Class Asian Transnational Families in North America explores the experiences of middle-class Korean transnational families, whose mothers and children migrate abroad for children’s education while fathers remain in Korea and economically support their families, throughout transnational separation: before separation, during separation, … [Read More]
Education and Social Stratification in South Korea
South Korea is noted for hard-fought competition in university admission exams, which are widely believed to determine one’s prospects and shape their takers’ entire lives. Long after graduation, do admissions exams still influence social circumstances? In this book, Shin Arita validates this belief with vast amounts of sociological data. He traces the mechanisms that show … [Read More]
Transgression in Korea: Beyond Resistance and Control
From the publisher’s website: Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has continued to grapple with transgressions that shook the nation to its core. Following the serial killings of Korea’s raincoat killer, the events that led to the dissolution of the United Progressive Party, the criminal negligence of the owner and also the crew members … [Read More]
Shadow Education and the Curriculum and Culture of Schooling in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: This book enables Western scholars and educators to recognize the roles and contributions of shadow education/hakwon education in an international context. The book allows readers to redefine the traditional and limited understanding of the background success behind Korean schooling and to expand their perspectives on Korean hakwon education, as well as … [Read More]
South Korea’s Education Exodus: The Life and Times of Early Study Abroad
From the publisher’s website: South Korea’s Education Exodus analyzes Early Study Abroad in relation to the neoliberalization of South Korean education and labor. With chapters based on demographic and survey data, discourse analysis, and ethnography in destinations such as Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, the book considers the complex motivations that spur families … [Read More]
No Alternative?: Experiments in South Korean Education
No Alternative? examines education in South Korea beyond daytime K-16 schooling—an escalating phenomenon in an increasingly neoliberal and globalizing society. Ethnographic portraits of private after-schooling, alternative schooling, home schooling, and adult distance education reveal that education producers and consumers often reject mainstream education while simultaneously seeking or embracing its symbolic value. Nancy Abelmann is Harry E. … [Read More]
The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945
From the publisher’s website: This study examines how the concept of “Korean woman” underwent a radical transformation in Korea’s public discourse during the years of Japanese colonialism. Theodore Jun Yoo shows that as women moved out of traditional spheres to occupy new positions outside the home, they encountered the pervasive control of the colonial state, … [Read More]
Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: In the half century after 1945, South Korea went from an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes to a prosperous, democratic industrial society. No less impressive was the country’s transformation from a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education to one with … [Read More]