Past Events at the Centre for the Study of Korea
February 2020
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Friday, February 14th The Ethics of the MeToo Movement--Political Transition-From Politics of Identity to Politics of Solidarity
Date Time Location Friday, February 14, 2020 2:00PM - 4:00PM Seminar Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
The MeToo movement in Korea that happened for the past two years shows some fundamental differences from past political movements against sexual discrimination. First, the former takes on the form of a voluntary mass movement. The MeToo movement began due to the female audience’s active acceptance of the major head slogan of anti-sexual violence movements, “It was not my fault.” The growing feminist awareness of sexual violence and problems that surged after 2015 allowed the women to accept the slogan with all their hearts and launch the movement. Secondly, as testimonies appeared subsequently, the violence was seen as a communal affliction, different from the past feminist movements. In the past, sexual violence victims faced suspicion and criticism as soon as they open up about their experiences and to prove their experiences, they went through individual trials in court. However, the MeToo movement was different. As the name “MeToo” itself signifies, the sexual assault victims’ cases were not perceived as discrete or separate, or cause to socially ostracize the victim. Instead, the Me Too movement allowed more opportunities for solidarity and collaboration.
Lastly, the MeToo movement does not involve victim identity politics that responds to the demand to prove the assault and adheres to victim centricism that claims that women are disadvantaged. Rather, the movement demands change in socially mandated male-hegemonic, heterosexual normative, authoritative communal culture and behavior status quo. In this presentation, we will look at the hints of possibilities of change demonstrated by the MeToo movement and whether these possibilities will be held back by the process of court and bureaucratic procedures. Sharing these concerns about possible challenges to these new changes, I plan to discuss how sexual assault could be politicized as a social phenomenon.Kwonkim Hyeonyoung is a Guest Professor in the Korea National University of Arts, South Korea. She sees herself as a research activist. She is a guest professor at Korean National University of Arts. She is the co-author of Analyzing the Korean man , Feminism of perpetration and victimhood and author of Will never turn back again. She also co-wrote twenty books, including The Politics of the MeToo Movement . Her primary interest as a researcher lies on exploring ways how gender politics of violence and power plays in today’s Korean society. As an activist, she reads written judgments in court, attends hearings at trials, protests in streets, and writes.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
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Friday, February 28th Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place
Date Time Location Friday, February 28, 2020 2:00PM - 4:00PM Second Floor Lounge, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 Friday, February 28, 2020 2:00PM - 4:00PM Seminar Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture-featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture. The local election system introduced in the mid 90s has stimulated strong desires among city mayors and county and district governors to develop and promote their areas. Riding on the Korean Wave—the overseas popularity of Korean entertainment, also called Hallyu—Korean cities have actively used K-dramas and K-pop idols in advertisements designed to attract foreign tourists to their regions. Hallyu, meanwhile, has turned the Korean entertainment industry into a speculative field into which numerous players venture by attracting cities as sponsors.
By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Popular culture-associated urban promotion also uses the emotional engagement of its users in advertising urban space, just as pop culture draws on fans’ and audiences’ affective commitments to sell its products. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
March 2020
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Friday, March 13th Making and Unmaking of the Speculative City: Urban Politics in South Korea + film screening of “Family in the Bubble
This event has been postponed
Date Time Location Friday, March 13, 2020 9:00AM - 4:00PM Seminar Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 Friday, March 13, 2020 10:00AM - 2:00PM Second Floor Lounge, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
Symposium & Documentary Screening
Making and Unmaking of the Speculative City: Urban Politics in South Korea
For screening event info and tickets please go to: https://family-in-the-bubble.eventbrite.caMarch 13-14, 2020 (Friday-Saturday)
Friday Symposium: 9:30am-3:15pm
Saturday Documentary Screening: 2:15-5:30pmThis event is sponsored by The Academy of Korean Studies, York University’s Korean Office for Research and Education, Center for the Study of Korea (U of Toronto), School of Cities (U of Toronto), and Hope21.
March 13 (Friday) Symposium
Room 208N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, University of Toronto-St. George campus
9:30-9:40 Welcome remark by Hyun-Ok Park (York)
9:40-9:50 Welcome remark by Yoonkyung Lee (U of Toronto)
9:50-10:00 Introduction to the Symposium: Hae Yeon Choo (U of Toronto)
10:00-11:00 Keynote Speech
Chair: Yewon Lee (U of Toronto)
Discussant: Hae Yeon Choo (U of Toronto)Laam Hae (York) “Toward a Dialectical Vision of Planetary Urbanization: Ecological Pro-Greenbelt Movements against the Construction State in Korea”
11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
11:15-12:45 Panel 1: The Making of the Speculative City
Chair: Yoonkyung Lee (U of Toronto)
Discussant: Seung-Cheol Lee (U of Mississippi)Hyun-Chul Kim (U of Toronto) “Juxtaposing biopolitics with speculative urbanisms: the development of private welfare/health institutions in South Korea”
Hae Yeon Choo (U of Toronto) “The Dictatorship of Capital: Urban Redevelopment and the Democracy of the Have-Nots in Post-Authoritarian South Korea”
12:45-2:00 Lunch Break
2:00-3:30 Panel 2 The Unmaking of the Speculative City
Chair: Hyun-Chul Kim (U of Toronto)
Discussant: Jesook Song (U of Toronto)Seung-Cheol Lee (U of Mississippi) “Seeing like a community entrepreneur: The capitalization of ‘community’ in Seoul’s community building project (maul mandulgi)”
Yewon Lee (U of Toronto) “Precarious Workers in the Speculative City: Making Worker’s Power of Self-Employed Tenant Shopkeepers in Seoul through the Production of Space”
March 14 (Saturday) 2:15pm-5:30pm
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue, University of Toronto-St. George campus
Documentary Screening of Family in the Bubble and Panel Discussion
For screening event please go to: https://family-in-the-bubble.eventbrite.ca
Moderator: Michelle Cho (U of Toronto)
Panel: Yewon Lee (U of Toronto) and Hae Yeon Choo (U of Toronto)Symposium and Documentary Screening Participant Bios
Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Culture at the University of Toronto. She has published on Asian cinemas and Korean wave television, video, and pop music in such venues as Cinema Journal, the International Journal of Communication, The Korean Popular Culture Reader, and Asian Video Cultures. She’s currently at work on a book about gender, media, and fandom in Korean-wave popular cultures.
Hae Yeon Choo is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is an author of Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016), a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea: factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Her current research examines the politics of land ownership in contemporary South Korea, delving into macro-level political contestations over land rights, together with the narratives of people who pursue class mobility through real estate speculation. She has also translated Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.
Laam Hae is an Associate Professor in the department of Politics at York University. Her research areas are urban political economy, neoliberal urbanism and urban social movements. She is the author of The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City: Regulating Spaces of Social Dancing in New York (2012, Routledge), and co-edited On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis (2019, University of Toronto Press). She is currently developing a research project that examines the spatiality of social reproduction and gender inequality in South Korea.
Hyun-Chul Kim is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto. Her research interests include the varied degree of confined, segregated spaces in East Asian regions, from nursing homes to prisons, considering urban constructions, intimacy, and disability. She is writing her dissertation tentatively titled “Between Communal ‘Village’ and an Atomized ‘Home’: Blurring the boundaries of community organization movement and segregated-confined welfare spaces of South Korea in 1950s-1960s”.
Seung Cheol Lee received his PhD from Columbia University in 2018 and is now an assistant professor of anthropology and East Asian Studies at the University of Mississippi. His research interests are focused on the question of how neoliberal financialization has reshaped people’s social, affective, ethical, and political lives. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how the ethicality and sociality of gift-giving are grafted onto neoliberal market rationality in the social economy sector in South Korea.
Yewon Andrea Lee is a Korean Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Study of Korea at University of Toronto. She is an ethnographer and urban and labor sociologist and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at UCLA. She is interested in speculative urbanism and how it generates new politics of dissent. In particular, her dissertation focuses on tenant shopkeepers whose livelihoods are disrupted by speculation on the urban spaces on which their shops stand and how these subjects organize via transforming everyday mundane spaces of work into symbolic spaces of dissent.
Yoonkyung Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the director of the Center for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. She is a political sociologist specializing in labor politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011) and numerous journal articles that appeared in Globalizations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Critical Asian Studies.
Hyun Ok Park teaches sociology and the director of the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University. With archival and ethnographic research, her research investigates global capitalism in colonial, industrial, and financial forms, democracy, socialism, and post-socialist transition. She is the author of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005). Her latest book is The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015). She is completing a book manuscript, “A Sublime Disaster: The Sewŏl Ferry Incident and the Politics of the Living Dead.”
Jesook Song is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on contemporary urban transformation and welfare issues, including homelessness, youth unemployment, single women’s housing, mental health in South Korea. She is author of South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (Duke University Press, 2009) and Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea (SUNY Press, 2014), On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis (University of Toronto Press 2019, co-edited with Laam Hae).
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.