CKS Spring 2018 Events
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Index
5/1 | A Korea/Mongolia Mixtape: Youth, Expression, and the New Nationalism in East Asia - Various
4/26 | Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea - Dafna Zur
3/15 | Protesting Precarity: Space, Infrastructure, and the Politics of the Body - Jennifer Jihye Chun
2/22 | An Evening of Korean Poetry - Various
2/21 | The North Korean Quagmire and the Moon Jae-in Government - Chung-in Moon, John Linton
2/21 | Decolonial and Deimperial Crossings: An Inter-Asian Feminist Genealogy - Laura Kang
2/12 | The Displacement of Borders among Russian Koreans in Northeast Asia - Hyun-Gwi Park
2/1 | The Gendered Politics of Socialist Consumption in North Korea, 1953-1965 - Andre Schmid
Tuesday, May 1 (4:00 p.m.)
A Korea/Mongolia Mixtape: Youth, Expression, and the New Nationalism in East Asia
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsor/s: Mongolia Initiative, Institute for East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies
Speakers:
Franck Bille (UC Berkeley)
Charlotte D'Evelyn (Loyola Marymount)
Peter K. Marsh (Cal Sate East Bay)
Marissa Smith (San Jose State University)
Stephanie Choi (UC Santa Barbara)
Eun-Young Jung (Independent Scholar)
Donna Kwon (University of Kentucky)
Kendra Van Nyhuis (UC Berkeley)
Thursday, April 26 (4:00 p.m.)
Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea
Dafna Zur (Stanford University)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Summary: Figuring Korean Futures is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child's body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. Reading children's periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. She demonstrates the ways in which Korean children's literature builds on a trajectory that begins with the child as an organic part of nature, and ends, in the post-colonial era, with the child as the primary agent of control of nature.
Thursday, March 15 (4:00 p.m.)
Protesting Precarity in South Korea: Space, Infrastructure, and the Politics of the Body
Jennifer Jihye Chun (University of Toronto)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Summary: Dramatic acts of resistance and solidarity are a mainstay in South Korea’s political landscape, especially for protesting workers and the broad base of union activists, students, religious leaders, progressive party members and human rights proponents that support their struggles. While labor and social movement scholars have examined the instrumental, organizational and structural factors that promote strategic forms of collective action, much less attention has been paid to the embodied, spatial and infrastructural dimensions of public protests. Why do people engage in extreme acts of protest, particularly acts that involve exceptional sacrifice and a high level of social suffering? How do extreme protest acts utilize the built environment, including the streets, the public squares, the transport systems, and the capitalist infrastructure itself, to express and carry on oppositional cultures of resistance and solidarity over time and place? This talk draws upon field research conducted over the past decade to examine how and how under what conditions public cultures of protest flourish among South Korean workers in their struggles against ongoing employment precaritization and the intensification of capitalist inequality.
Bio: Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in Sociology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea, housed at the Asian Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles on gender, labor, migration and social movements. Currently, she holds a five-year SSHRC Insight grant entitled, “Protesting Publics in South Korea.” She is also engaged in research collaborations on immigrant women workers and care worker organizing in California and global comparative approaches to studying informal and precarious worker organizing.
Thursday, February 22 (4:00 p.m.)
An Evening of Korean Poetry
Location: Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704
Co-Sponsor/s: Literature Translation Institute of Korea
Speakers:
Sae-young Oh (poet)
Jae Moo Lee (poet)
Keutbyul Jeong (Ewha Womans University)
David McCann (Harvard University)
Youngmin Kwon (UC Berkeley)
Wednesday, February 21 (3:00 p.m.)
The North Korean Quagmire and the Moon Jae-in Government: Nukes, Humanitarian Assistance, and Prospects for Inter-Korean Relations
Chung-in Moon (Yonsei University), John Linton (Severance Hospital of Yonsei Medical School)
Location: Social Science Matrix, Floor 8, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies, Social Science Matrix
Summary: With the ongoing crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons, questions of humanitarian assistance to North Korea have fallen by the wayside. Prof. Chung-in Moon will talk about the Moon Jae-in government’s policy towards North Korea. Prof. John Linton will talk about about overall humanitarian conditions in North Korea and his experience in the North as a medical doctor curing TB patients.
Bios:
Chung-in Moon is Distinguished University Professor at Yonsei University and Editor-in-Chief of Global Asia, a quarterly journal in English. He is also Krause Distinguished Fellow, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UCSD. He has published fifty-six authored, co-authored, and edited volumes and over three hundred articles in academic journals and edited volumes. He was a Public Policy Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a Lixian Scholar of Beijing University, and a Pacific Leadership Fellow at Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, UCSD. He was executive director of the Kim Dae-jung Presidential Library and Museum.
Dr. John Linton, better known as Ihn Yohan in Korea, is a 4th generation missionary descendent. Dr. Linton received his M.D. in 1987 from Yonsei University College of Medicine. After a Family Medicine residency in New York, he returned to Korea in 1991, where he has served as the Director of International Health Care Center at Yonsei University Severance Hospital until the present. He earned his M.S. and Ph. D from Korea University in 2000 and 2003, respectively. He has received many awards from the government of South Korea, two of which include the Order of Civil Merit ‘Mokryun’ and the Order of Merit from the National Human Rights Commission of Korea.
Monday, February 12 (4:00 p.m.)
The Displacement of Borders among Russian Koreans in Northeast Asia
Hyun-Gwi Park (University of Cambridge)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies, Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Mongolia Initiative
Summary: Since the late nineteenth century, ethnic Koreans have represented a small yet significant portion of the population of the Russian Far East, but until now, the phenomenon has been largely understudied. Based on extensive historical and ethnographic research, Hyun Gwi Park reveals timely new insights into the historical and current experiences of Koreans living along the Eurasian frontier. His latest book is the first book in English to chart the contemporary social life of Koreans in the complex borderland region. Dispelling the commonly held notion that Koreans were completely removed from the region during the coutnry's attempt to "cleanse" its borders in 1937.
Thursday, February 1 (4:00 p.m.)
The Gendered Politics of Socialist Consumption in North Korea, 1953-1965
Andre Schmid (University of Toronto)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Summary: How was ʻproperʼ consumption conceived in the newly emergent socialist order of North Korea? Schmid explores the idea of the Party-state in representing a population united around the Kim family and the (not unrelated) tendency of foreign observers to see North Korea as an extreme case of totalitarianism, there was in fact no straightforward answer to this question in the early postwar years. Rather, the realm of consumption captured many of the tensions and anxieties that underpinned the revolutionary politics of this postcolonial state and social order. The ambivalence at high levels of the Party-state on consumption offered a degree of manoeuvring room in the local social worlds of the population. Through such issues as home décor, clothing fashion, and outdoor leisure, lower level writers and commentators sought to work out new notions of masculinity and femininity as well as class as one way of coming to terms with the (im)possibilities of mass utopia.