Description

Join the Centre for the Study of Korea in a celebration of Dr. Sherry Yu’s book “Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles.” Dr. Yu will be joined by Dr. Karim Karim who will be the discussant for the event.

Sherry S. Yu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Karim H. Karim is a Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication and the Director of the Carleton Centre for the Study of Islam at Carleton University. He is also an Associate of Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Centre for European Studies at Carleton University.

Coffee and refreshments available at event.

Description

During the Korean civil war, thousands of real and imagined “leftists” were massacred by the emerging South Korean state. In the wake of South Korea’s long process of post-authoritarian transitional justice, the nature of many of these atrocities has to come to light, in turn leading to increased interest from South Korean and international scholars. This talk builds upon this research by focusing on the role that the family structure played in determining the targets and methods of the perpetrators. Drawing on Elisa Von Joeden-Forgey’s concept of “life force atrocities,” I discuss the ways in which counter-insurgency forces incorporated the decimation the family unit as part of the broader process of anti-leftist liquidation. This pattern was continued into the post-war years, as survivors and families of accused “leftists” were denied the right to properly mourn and placed under the “guilt by association system”. I argue that this process of systematic persecution gave rise to novel forms of communal identities, anchored around the notion of the collective bereaved family. This, in turn, led to unique forms of political resistance in the 1960-1961 period.

Dr Wright is currently the Korea Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2016. He is currently working on completing his manuscript “Civil War, Politicide, and the Politics of Memory in South Korea, 1948-1961”. His work has been published in Cross Currents, The Asia Pacific Journal, and by Routledge.

Description

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of university students, labor activists, civil rights lawyers, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among young Chinese women. Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, Hong Fincher describes how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.

Dr. Leta Hong Fincher is a journalist, scholar and author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso 2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek and others. She is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing. She also has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Harvard University. Her first book was the critically acclaimed Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed 2014).

* Dr. Fincher’s book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China will be available for purchase at the venue.*

Description

A multisite church is a single church that meets at multiple locations, often through the use of audio, projection, and even hologram technologies. Nearly all megachurches in the world have adopted this franchise-like form in the last decade, but this fairly new organizational practice originated in South Korea in the 1970s. This talk draws upon transnational ethnographic research at two of the first multisite churches in the world: Yoido Full Gospel Church and Onnuri Church. Following the speaker’s participant-observation on production technology teams at these churches, this talk illustrates Christian efforts to create and maintain “holy infrastructures” [kŏrukhan inp’ŭra] through one’s body, actions, and the objects of one’s practice. Ultimately, this talk asks how one might imagine ethics and pursue the good life in a world permeated by often unseen networks of contact and communion, conscription and contagion.

Heather Mellquist Lehto is a cultural anthropologist who studies religion, technology, and social relations. She is currently a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and she holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in religious studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her first book manuscript, Holy Infrastructure: The Multisite Church Revolution in South Korea and the United States draws on two years of multisited ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles to explore the coordination of technological and religious innovation in some of the world’s first and largest multisite churches.

Description

This talk discusses the rapid emergence of ban damunhwa (“anti-multiculture”) or the sentiment of anti-immigration in South Korea. Ban damunhwa discourse centers on a variety of issues such as the state’s multicultural policy, crimes by foreigners and problems of the so-called “illegal sojourners” and has been most active and visible on the Internet especially since the mid-2000s. In this talk, I specifically focus on the way ban damunhwa defines the state’s multicultural policy as what gives special preferences to migrants, which, in turn, is said to destroy the livelihoods of the nationals. Represented as “voices of ordinary citizens,” ban damunhwa narratives appeal to, not nationalist or racist sentiments, but rather a neoliberal commonsense of fairness and equity, under which migrants emerge as demonic free-riders. I show how ban damunhwa not only serves as a symptom of a neoliberal ethic but also mirrors the dilemma of the people who struggle under neoliberal system of precarity and yet persist it by reproducing its main ideologies.

EuyRyung Jun is assistant professor of anthropology at Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, South Korea. Jun primarily works on migration, multiculturalism, right-wing populism, and biopolitics and animal discourse. She has published articles in FOCAAL, Positions, Anthropological Quarterly, Kyeongje wa Sahoe [Economy and Society], and Hanguk Munhwa Inryuhak [Korean Cultural Anthropology]. She also writes for Kyunghyang Shinmun, a major newspaper in South Korea, on animal issues.

Description

“First, it was just tech people. Now, literally everyone is interested in Bitcoin,” said New York Times while reporting on the Bitcoin mania that haunted South Korean society in the winter of 2017-2018. In this talk, I take this collective effervescence as an entry point to explore the “magical” features of contemporary financial capitalism. Drawing upon an ethnographic research on a South Korean Bitcoin investor online community, I first examine how the logics of uncertainty and luck are found at the heart of casino capitalism and how lay investors deal with the ambiguous future and luck in their everyday practices. In analogizing their logic and practices with those of gamblers, I illuminate how the emerging mass investment culture exhibits the religious and magical understanding of the world based on self-fulfilling “performativity” and what André Orléan calls “collective belief.” In consequence, this talk seeks to situate the Bitcoin frenzy and its mass investment culture within the broader transformation of human condition with the triumphant rise of financial capitalism. 

Seung Cheol LEE is 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 the formation of mass investment culture in South Korea in the context of its post-developmental and post-work transition.