Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity around the world in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. This book presents a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in Korea through the feminist politics of care, bringing together intersecting narratives of marginalization to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a … [Read More]
Booklist: Science technology and medicine
City in a Future Tense: The Making of a Smart City in South Korea [forthcoming]
Songdo, South Korea, is one of the earliest and most ambitious smart city projects. Mythical narratives have painted it as a promised land of the future where the problems and struggles of the present have been efficiently transcended—or concealed—by technology. In City in a Future Tense, Chamee Yang interrogates these myths and traces Songdo’s story to show how it … [Read More]
Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance
North Korea may be known as the world’s most secluded society, but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in 2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That number has grown tremendously in … [Read More]
Buddhism, Digital Technology and New Media in Korea: Ŭisang’s Ocean Seal Diagram
Buddhism, Digital Technology and New Media in Korea introduces Ŭisang (625-702), a seminal figure in East Asian religion who founded the Korean Hwaŏm school of Buddhism from various angles and placing his thought in the interdisciplinary and transcultural context of the twenty-first century. The book presents and analyses the scope of Ŭisang’s teachings in Korean … [Read More]
The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North Korea’s Global Cyber War
Investigative journalist, author and broadcaster Geoff White is among the UK’s leading technology specialists, working for the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Sunday Times and many more. In a career spanning 20 years he has covered election hacking, the dark web, the personal data trade and the emergence of cybercrime as one of the primal … [Read More]
Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea
South Korea is home to cutting-edge electronics, state-of-the-art medical facilities, and ubiquitous high-speed internet. The country’s meteoric rise from the ashes of the Korean War (1950–1953) to rank among the world’s most technologically advanced societies is often attributed to state-led promotion of science and technology in nation-building projects. With chapters that discuss Korea’s dynastic past, … [Read More]
Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas
Media technologies for play have become major industries in Japan and South Korea. Even in North Korea, citizens bypass the state to enjoy popular culture. At the same time, corporations and governments encourage people to produce economic values through play. The first comparative study of media technologies in Japan and the two Koreas, this book … [Read More]
Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea: Humanity and Nature, 1706-1814
Historians of late premodern Korea have tended to regard it as a hermit kingdom, isolated from its neighbours and the wider world. In fact, as Ro argues in this book, Korean intellectuals were heavily influenced by both Chinese Neo-Confucianism and the European Enlightenment in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In the late Choson period … [Read More]
Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea
From the publisher’s website: In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea, public health priorities in maternal and infant welfare privileged the new nation’s reproductive health and women’s responsibility for care work to produce novel organization of services in hospitals and practices in the home. The first monograph on this topic, Imperatives of Care places women … [Read More]
Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea: Contemporary Research and Future Prospects
From the publisher’s website: In recent decades, Korean communication and media have substantially grown to become some of the most significant segments of Korean society. Since the early 1990s, Korea has experienced several distinctive changes in its politics, economy, and technology, which are directly related to the development of local media and culture. Korea has … [Read More]
Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century
From the publisher’s website: Naming the Local uncovers how Koreans domesticated foreign medical novelties on their own terms, while simultaneously modifying the Korea-specific expressions of illness and wellness to make them accessible to the wider network of scholars and audiences. Due to Korea’s geopolitical position and the intrinsic tension of medicine’s efforts to balance the local … [Read More]
Smartland Korea: Mobile Communication, Culture, and Society
From the publisher’s website: The dramatic advancement of cellphone technology has fundamentally changed our daily lives. Smartphones and their applications have created new capital for information and communication technology corporations and changed the way people communicate. Because of an interesting awareness of the significance for digital economy and people’s daily culture, many countries, from the U.S. to … [Read More]
Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945
From the publisher’s website: South Korea represents one of the world’s most enthusiastic markets for plastic surgery. The growth of this market is particularly fascinating as access to medical care and surgery arose only recently with economic growth since the 1980s. Reconstructing Bodies traces the development of a medical infrastructure in the Republic of Korea (ROK) from … [Read More]
The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History
From the publisher’s website: This volume makes available for the first time in English a collection of the work of historian Yi Tae-Jin. Over the course of his career, he has done path-breaking research that covers virtually the entire Chosōn period (1392–1910) from the Koryō-Chosōn transition to the Kojong period and Korea’s takeover by Japan … [Read More]