Description

Decentering Citizenship follows three groups of Filipina migrants’ struggles to belong in South Korea: factory workers claiming rights as workers, wives of South Korean men claiming rights as mothers, and hostesses at American military clubs who are excluded from claims—unless they claim to be victims of trafficking. Moving beyond laws and policies, Hae Yeon Choo examines how rights are enacted, translated, and challenged in daily life and ultimately interrogates the concept of citizenship.

Choo reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Her vivid ethnography of both migrants and their South Korean advocates illuminates how social inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation operate in defining citizenship. Decentering Citizenship argues that citizenship emerges from negotiations about rights and belonging between South Koreans and migrants. As the promise of equal rights and full membership in a polity erodes in the face of global inequalities, this decentering illuminates important contestation at the margins of citizenship.

Hae Yeon Choo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her book Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016) examines how inequalities of gender, race, and class affect migrant rights through a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea—factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and club hostesses.

Discussants:

Anna Korteweg is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work problematizes the notion of “immigrant integration” and the ways in which belonging is defined in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity and national origin in Western Europe and Canada. Her co-authored book (with Gökçe Yurdakul), Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging, was published by Stanford University Press in 2014.

Jesook Song is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. She is an urban anthropologist of political economy and subject formation in finance, welfare, education, and neoliberalism, focusing on South Korean context. Her books include South Koreans in the Debt Crisis (Duke University Press 2009), Living on Your Own (SUNY Press 2014), New Millennium South Korea (editor, Routldged 2011).

Please join us for the post-event reception to welcome the start of CSK’s new academic year. During the event we will welcome Jesook Song as our interim director for the year. Beverages and food will be provided.