Description

This presentation examines two recent Kdramas that fictionalize the Korean media and entertainment industries: Dream High (KBS, broadcast Jan-Feb 2011) and Answer Me 1997 (tvN, broadcast July-August 2012). My aim is to question the operation of metatextual, serial narrative television and the ways in which this kind of content highlights the relationship between public and commercial broadcasting, state and consumer culture, and media literacy and cultural citizenship. I examine the formal and narrative means by which the shows address concerns about the end of politics, generational divides, and youth disenfranchisement, while simultaneously shoring up the celebratory discourse of hallyu. My presentation thus analyzes the manner in which these dramas make visible the disjunctive consequences of the push to globalize as a national survival strategy, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, and the incomplete transformation of state-controlled broadcast media into something like a mediatized public sphere.

Michelle Cho is a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies at McGill University. She is completing a book that analyzes South Korean genre cinemas in the “Sunshine Policy” decade, and her current research examines the relationship between popular culture and populism in South Korea with a focus on celebrity, fan labor, hallyu globalization, and media convergence. Forthcoming essays will appear in the Korean Popular Culture Reader (2014) and Cinema Journal.

Description

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is the world’s most heavily militarized border and is often described in terrestrial terms as a no-man’s land. Uninhabited for sixty years since the end of the Korean War, the DMZ has long represented for South Koreans the trauma of the national division. In recent years, however, as evidence of the zone’s biodiversity has drawn the interest of scientists, environmentalists, state bureaucrats, the DMZ is now increasingly associated with narratives of nature’s resilience and symbols of peace and life. One of the species that plays a central role in these narratives is the critically endangered Red-crowned Crane, which flies from the Amur region of Russia annually to winter in the DMZ area. Their declining numbers are a source of concern for ornithologists, bird lovers, and international conservation organizations, as well as the South Korean and North Korean states. Another highly endangered, yet less celebrated, species is the Black-faced Spoonbill, that breeds in the islands within the contested waters of the Northern Limit Line. This paper examines the DMZ’s skies as ecological, political, and military passageways, focusing on the flyways of migratory birds that are framed as transcending the national division and geopolitical antagonisms. Focusing on avian flyways, which define the migration spaces of bird species, this paper asks what alternative cartographies and interspecial poetics might be possible for rethinking the contemporary convergence of global security and environmental preservation.

Eleana Kim is a cultural anthropologist who research areas include kinship, personhood, nationalism, political ecology, and environment. She is the author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press, 2010) and her work on transnational adoption has appeared in journals such as Social Text, Anthropological Quarterly and the Journal of Korean Studies. Her current project, Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone examines the Korean DMZ as a site of political, ecological, and social change and contestation in the context of the national division, global climate change, and mass extinction. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Description

CONFERENCE AGENDA:

FRIDAY, February 28, 2014

5:00-5:30PM Conference Registration

5:30- 6:00PM Opening Ceremony
Professor Ito Peng (University of Toronto), Professor
Jennifer Jihye Chun (Centre for Korea Studies, University of Toronto)

6:00-7:00PM Keynote Presentation: Migrant Women and Reproductive Labor at the
Intersection of Three Intimate Industries
Speaker: Professor Nicole Constable (University of Pittsburgh)

(Introduction: Professor Rachel Silvey (University of Toronto)

7:00-8:30PM Networking and graduate Students Poster Session

SATURDAY, March 01, 2014

8:30-9:00AM Conference Registration

9:00-10:45AM Roundtable Discussion 1: Shaping and Framing Care
Chair: Professor Susan McDaniel (University of Lethbridge)
Presenters: Professor Ito Peng (University of Toronto), Professor Mi Young An (Kookmin University), Professor Hae Yeon Choo (University of Toronto), Professor André Laliberté (University of Ottawa), Professor Sonya Michel (University of Maryland, College Park) and Professor Rianne Mahon (Wilfrid Laurier University)

10:45-11:00AM Break

11:00AM-12:30PM Roundtable Discussion 2: Structural Factors in the Supply and Demand of Care
Chair: Professor Sonya Michel (University of Maryland, College Park)
Presenters: Professor Susan McDaniel (University of Lethbridge), Professor Deborah Brennan (University of New South Wales), Professor Sara Charlesworth (University of South Australia)

12:30-1:45PM Lunch

1:45-3:15PM Roundtable Discussion 3: Care Provisioning
Chair: Professor Ito Peng (University of Toronto)
Presenters: Professor Monica Boyd (University of Toronto), Professor Cynthia Cranford (University of Toronto), Professor Rachel Silvey (University of Toronto) and Professor Jennifer Jihye Chun (University of Toronto)

3:15-4:30PM Researchers and Partners Networking Session

4:30-6:00PM Roundtable Discussion 4: Policy and Research Connections
** Open to graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and all conference participants
Chair: Professor Monica Boyd (University of Toronto)
Presenters: Richard De Marco (Employment and Social Development Canada), Abdullah BaMasoud (SEIU Healthcare), Young Shin (Asian Immigrant Women Advocates), Professor Jennifer Jihye Chun (University of Toronto), Victoria Rietig
(Migration Policy Institute)

6:00-7:00PM Break

7:00-9:00PM Closing Ceremony and Dinner

Description

Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World is a new documentary film about how a social justice organization based in Oakland California—Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA)—focused on building long-term collective leadership of limited-English speaking immigrants, and empowered women and youth to become powerful agents of social change.

AIWA has inspired hundreds of low-wage immigrant garment, electronic and healthcare workers in the San Francisco Bay Area. AIWA’s Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS) has been a model for many immigrant organizations. After 15 years, Young Shin is taking CTOS on the road to foster a broader dialogue with local communities in Canada and the U.S. about the importance of grassroots leadership development in community organizing.

There will be a post-film discussion with Young Shin, Excutive Director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.

Description

Japanese censorship in Korea began during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and all major laws that governed colonial-era publication were promulgated prior to territorial annexation in 1910. Piloting a way to examine the continuity and discontinuity in Japanese publication policing from the pre-annexation period through the post-annexation era, this paper traces the fashioning of the professional trajectories of key Japanese censors who were engaged in censoring and maneuvering Korean-language newspapers. By casting their second-language acquisition and use of bilingual proficiency against the backdrop of human and institutional networks around them, the paper demonstrates an analytic advantage that the focus on censors offers to our understanding of the Japanese reconstruction of national subjectivity mediated through the access to and control over public knowledge in Korea.

Kyeong-Hee Choi is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Modern Korean Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests revolve around literary and cinematic representations of gender, modernity, colonialism, censorship, and democratization. She has published Korean- and English-language articles on the topics of New Womanhood, autobiographical writings, and impairment, and gender and “pro-Japanese” discourse. Her recent publications include “The Establishment of the Book Department and Systematization of Japanese Colonial Publication Police, 1926-1929” (2006) and “Issues and Challenges for Post-liberation Censorship Studies” (2011), both co-authored with Keun-sik Jung. Her forthcoming book, entitled Beneath the Vermilion Ink, deals with the impact of Japanese colonial censorship on the making of modern Korean literature.

Description

In the 1920s some of Korea’s most famous communists were young women. Political suppression and exile obliged them to be transnational and multi-lingual as they moved between colonial Korea, China, the United States and the Soviet Union. This talk examines the lives of two legendary early communists, Hŏ Chŏng-suk (the heiress) and Chu Se-juk (the peasant). Beautiful, intelligent and notorious, they appeared in the social pages as well as arrest notices of the daily newspapers in Seoul. These women bear comparison with socialist and communist women orators and leaders elsewhere in the world who in the early to mid-twentieth century embraced political life and party leadership. Far from being forgotten after their deaths, Korea’s early communist women continue to exercise a powerful hold upon the political imagination of divided Korea. These two friends, one of whom became a revered politician in North Korea while the other was caught in Stalin’s purges, encapsulate a classic narrative about leftist women long current in anti-communist South Korea: either as tragic victims of communism’s pathologies or ruthless purveyors of it. This talk argues for a re-evaluation of these early activists that allows us to see their complex feminist legacy.

Ruth Barraclough is senior lecturer in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She is the author of Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea (2012). Her new project is a biographical history of Korea’s early communist women.

Description

INDePth – Interrogating Notions of Development and Progress – is an annual student-run conference at the University of Toronto. The conference comprises of panels, workshops, unconference sessions, a gala dinner and a Great Debate to not only facilitate intellectually stimulating conversations but also connect undergraduate and graduate students from across the globe. Focusing on the Korean peninsula as a case study, INDePth 2014 proudly presents prominent speakers including Ms. Christine Ahn (Korea Policy Institute), Dr. Michael Robinson (Indiana University), Dr. Hyunjin Seo (University of Kansas). The conference is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Asian Institute, Centre for the Study of Korea, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and many other organizations and has built networks with Western University, University of Alberta, Carleton University, York University etc.

2014 Conference:
INDePth seeks to foster an environment for university students to apply what they have learned in the classroom and start meaningful conversations about key global issues. Korea represents a unique case study as, more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Korean peninsula is still mired in Cold War era divisions. Its contemporary reality may seem to reinforce traditional balance-of-power politics, however it also showcases the possibilities for a fracturing of global power relations through the dynamism of soft power, media representation, economic development and civil society. The issues surrounding the relationship between the North and South Korea have been commonly discussed in static frameworks where the emphasis tends to be on the diametrically opposed economic, political, and social systems. This conference aims to pose important but complex questions about the two Koreas which will allow delegates to contemplate the overarching issues of security, social change and conflict resolution in the peninsula.

What Does Your Ticket Include?
The one time registration fee grants you admission to our two-day conference at Great Hall, Hart House at the University of Toronto from March 20-21, 2014. You will be provided a nametag, a conference program, lunch and coffee break snacks each day at the conference. The fee also includes your ticket to the gourmet buffet style, semiformal Reception Dinner at Arisu on the evening of March 21st. Please refer to following detailed schedule:

Day 1 / Thursday, March 20, 2014
Agents of Change: Development and Progress on a Divided Peninsula

09:00am – 10:00am REGISTRATION
10:00am – 11:00am KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Marius Grinius (former Canadian Ambassador to South Korea)
11:00am – 12:30pm PANEL- AGENTS OF CHANGE: DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS ON A DIVIDED PENINSULA
Moderator: Jennifer McCann (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto)
Panelists: Jack Kim (Founder and former Executive Director, HanVoice), Michael Robinson (Adjunct Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University Bloomington), Hyunjin Seo (Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication, University of Kansas)
12:30pm – 01:00pm Q&A SESSION
01:00pm – 02:00pm LUNCH
02:00pm – 03:00pm WORKSHOPS
Media Representations, The Role of Civil Society Organizations, The Kaesong Industrial Complex and Economic Cooperation & Conflict
03:00pm – 04:00pm TEA BREAK + UNCONFERENCE SESSIon

Day 2 / Friday, March 21, 2014
The “Hermit Kingdom”: The Global Context of Modern Korea

09:30am – 10:00am CHECK-IN
10:00am – 11:30am PANEL – THE “HERMIT KINGDOM”: THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF MODERN KOREA
Moderator: Tina Jiwon Park (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto)
Panelists: Christine Ahn (Co-Founder of the Korea Policy Institute and Founder of Women De-Militarize the Zone), Seung Hyok Lee (Assistant Adjunct Professor of Renison University College, University of Waterloo), Donald Rickerd (Associate Director of the Asian Business and Management Program, York University)
11:30am – 12:00pm Q&A SESSION
12:00pm – 01:00pm LUNCH
01:00pm – 02:00pm WORKSHOPS
The Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asian Security, Soft Power Diplomacy, Global and Transnational Forces
02:00pm – 03:30pm TEA BREAK + THE GREAT DEBATE
Oxford Style, Question TBA
Mentors: Shin Hyung Choi (MA Candidate, University of Toronto), TBA
03:30pm – 04:00pm CLOSING REMARKS
Kwang-Kyun Chung (Consul General of the Republic of Korea,Toronto)
04:00pm – 06:00pm BREAK
06:00pm – 09:00pm RECEPTION DINNER at ARISU

Registration Dates & Methods
– UofT Students Early Bird: $40.00 CAD (until Feb. 14, 2014)
– Students: $50.00 CAD (until Mar. 19, 2014)
– General Public: $60.00 CAD (until Mar. 19, 2014)

Cash registration: email internal@indepthconference.com

Online registration at http://www.eventbrite.ca/e/indepth-conference-2014-korea-registration-10138076259

For Group Registration (any group with 6 or more students), we offer special discount. Please skip this process and directly contact internal@indepthconference.com before Mar. 13 to acquire group discount.

For more information on INDePth, visit www.indepthconference.com
Like INDePth on Facebook: facebook.com/indepthconference
Follow INDePth on Twitter: @INDePthCon

Description

Mahbub Alam, born in Bangladesh, came to South Korea in 1999 as a migrant worker. While witnessing harsh reality and discrimination against migrant workers, Alam joined labor movements and later engaged in media activism. He took part in a number of film projects as both a director and an actor (The Deported (2007), Bandobi (2009), The Returnee (2009), City of Crane (2010), Love in Korea (2010), and others). He is an author of his autobiography, I am an Earthian (2010). He was a director of Asia Media Culture Factory, a cultural organization for diversity, and Free port, a migrant art center where he organized Seoul Migrant Art Festival and Earthian Music Band.

Based on his various experiences as once a migrant worker and a now Korean citizen, Alam will discuss problems of the media representation of foreign migrants in Korea and show how communications through art and cultural activities play an important role to build a community which would overcome ethnic and national boundaries.

Description

Katharine Moon is the author of newly published Protesting America: Democracy and the U.S.-Korea Relations. Her lecture addresses South Korea’s “new nationalism,” conflict and cooperation among political activists, and their views of the U.S. military bases in South Korea. She explores how democracy and social movements have affected the military alliance between the U.S. and Korea and makes comparative reference to transnational activism against U.S. bases in other parts of the world.

Katharine Moon is also Professor in the Department of Political Science at Wellesley College. Moon received her B.A., magna cum laude, from Smith College and her Ph.D. from Princeton University, Department of Politics. She was born in San Francisco. Her administrative roles include Chairwoman of the Department of Political Science, Director of the East Asian Studies Program, Director of the Social Sciences, and executive committee membership in the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.

Description

How are securitization processes affecting migrant workers and the cities to which they migrate? How are migration politics associated with the production and disruption of various forms of urban and gendered inequalities in transnational ‘Asia’? What are the socio-spatial effects of securitization efforts aimed at migrants? Research on the growth of the global precarious working class tends to assume an unmarked male norm, and to posit the growing class of low-income, underemployed men in particular as a threat to national- and state-defined societal security. This workshop is aimed at both challenging the foundations of such existing research and beginning to illuminate the contours of a more complex, socially differentiated sense of what constitutes ‘in/security’ in relation to migration processes. This workshop examines the range of types of in/security associated with labor migration, and particularly the ways in which these are operating—materially and discursively—in transnational ‘Asian’ urbanization processes. This workshop opens up a broadly based discussion of these themes.

KEYNOTE IS CANCELLED DUE TO FLIGHT DELAY OF THE SPEAKER. TWO PANELS WILL STILL BE ON, STARTING AT THE DESIGNATED TIME BELOW:

Introduction and Welcome 1:00-1:10pm

Ito Peng, Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto

Keynote 1:10-2:25pm CANCELLED
Does National Security Ensure Human Security? The Case of Migrant Domestic Workers

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, University of Southern California

In this talk, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas asks the question – does national security ensure human security? She addresses this question by looking at the legal incorporation of migrant domestic workers. She argues that establishing “national security” has not been good for the human security of migrant women. This is seen in three ways: 1) national security funnels migrant women to domestic work, leading to their labor market and spatial segregation in the domestic sphere; 2) it hampers their free migration — national security in the guise of protecting citizens for traffickers, that is criminals, leads to the greater hardship, in other words “diminished human security” of migrant women; 3) national security has come at the cost of excluding migrants from full membership and the denial of their social security benefits, thus it comes at the expense of not recognizing migrant labor contributions to the national economy.She will conclude with an examination of how we should prioritize the human security of migrant women by recasting the dominant principles determining national security.

PANEL I 2:30-3:45pm STILL ON
Securitization & Migration: (Re)Producing Exclusions
Chair:
Tracey Skelton
Associate Professor, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Panelists:
Alison Mountz
Canada Research Chair in Global Migration, The Balsillie School of International Affairs; Associate Professor of Geography, Wilfrid Laurier University
Emily Gilbert
Director of the Canadian Studies Program; Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto
Jennifer Hyndman
Director of Centre for Refugee Studies; Professor of Departments of Social Science and Geography, York University
Philip Kelly
Director of York Centre for Asian Research; Professor of Geography, York University

PANEL II 4:00-5:15pm STILL ON
Securitization & Migration: Organizing Possible Futures
Chair:
Rachel Silvey
(Associate Profession, Department of Geography, University of Toronto)

Panelists:
Deborah Cowen
Associate Professor of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Judy Han
Assistant Professor of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Jennifer Chun
Assistant Professor of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

This event is co-organised by Professor Tracey Skelton (Associate Professor, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore) and Professor Rachel Silvey (Associate Profession, Department of Geography, University of Toronto)

Description

How do individuals make diasporic spaces in cities, and how might we photograph these spaces and their material aesthetic markers? This seminar looks to bring together undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty from both the University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore to explore a small part of Toronto’s Chinatown and Graffiti alley as a way of better understanding the opportunities and challenges of using visual methods, particularly digital photography and new media to document, explore and problematise material migrant spaces.
The seminar will run on Wednesday, April 2nd from 0900hrs to 1700hrs. If there is a sufficient number of interested participants, there will be with an optional night walk that will explore the challenges of low-light photography in urban environments.

Technical Workshop for Beginners in Visual Methods:
The seminar will take place at the University of Toronto. Participants will be expected to bring along their own digital imaging device, which can range from a smartphone to a compact camera to a professional-grade DSLR, and preferably a laptop to edit their photographs after the afternoon walk. The morning will begin with a short technical introduction to the use of cameras in urban environments, and the limitations of newer imaging devices like the iPhone and Android systems to capturing urban spaces.

Exploring Chinatown and Graffiti Alley:
Participants will work in groups of 2 or 3 (preferably pairs of NUS and UoT participants) to explore the nearby Chinatown and Graffiti Alley south of the UoT campus. This will involve a short train ride to Osgoode station, followed by a walk down Queen Street West to the junction of Soho Street. Participants will be encouraged to visualise the area based on a specific item, aesthetic marker or theme of their choosing. This could be religious artefacts, graffiti, litter, reflections in the glass, shadows, etc.
Once the photographs are taken participants will convene back at UoT for an informal discussion and critique of their work.

Schedule for 2nd April 2014
9:00 Gather at UoT for Technical Workshop – Optional for intermediate to advanced users
10:30 Tea Break
11:00 All participants gather for discussion on visualisation of migrant spaces and share existing work
11:45 Lunch + Seminar break-out to Chinatown and Graffiti Alley (groups of 2 to 3)
15:00 Meet back at UoT to show and discuss work, peer critique
16:50 End of Seminar
20:00 Optional: Urban Night Photography Walk (max 6 participants)

About the Speaker:
Dr Terence Heng is a documentary photographer and visual sociologist. His research interests include the visualisation of spiritual spaces in urban Singapore, ethnicity-making in Chinese wedding rituals and visual methods for the social sciences. His work has been published in Cultural Geographies, Sociological Research Online and is forthcoming in Visual Communication. Terence is concurrently an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, and the exhumations and re-interment documentation co-coordinator for the Bukit Brown Cemetery Documentation Project, where he is photographing one of the key material spaces of Singapore’s Chinese migrant past. In 2013, Bukit Brown Cemetery became the first site in Singapore to be listed on the World Monument Fund’s Watchlist.

Description

“For all time,” Rancière tells us, “the refusal to consider certain categories of people as political beings has proceeded by means of a refusal to hear the words exiting their mouths as discourse.” This lecture traces the response to that refusal in literary and film texts in colonial and post-colonial Korea. I link aesthetic and critical demonstrations of the ambivalence of language and attendant notions of truth in colonial period literature and thought—a “crisis of representation”—to attempts in more recent work to represent the precarious subject through the reframing or disturbance of literary and visual fields. The discussion suggests connections between modernist strategies that challenged the communicability of language, the closely related critique of empiricism or scientific truth, and the reframing of linguistic and visual forms of intelligibility in present-day South Korean fiction and film.

Christopher P. Hanscom is an assistant professor in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Author of The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard, 2013), a study of theories of language and modernist fiction in colonial Korea, and co-editor of Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (Hawai’I, 2013), his research interests include the relationship between political and aesthetic forms, comparative colonialism, concepts of race and culture under Japanese empire, and representations of post-national sociality.

Description

It is widely accepted that a “Confucian transformation” occurred in the late Chosŏn period, rather than the first part of the dynasty. Even though we accept the argument that, by the late Chosŏn, Korea had undergone “Confucianization”, it is not immediately clear how, through what processes, and to what extent this transformation occurred. It is not enough to explain that the culture and ideas of the Yangban elite were diffused over time. In this presentation I would like to suggest that it is necessary to rethink the Confucian transformation in the late Chosŏn period in relation to the role of the government policies and people’s multilayered and unpredictable reactions to them. Focusing on the differences manifested in each social standing – of yangban, commoner, and low class– this presentation analyzes the household registration policy of the state, the composition of a household, the changes in the ways of the succession of householder, and the position of widows. Based on an analysis of household registries between 1678 and 1789, I argue that the process in which the Confucian order of society became the major aspect of postwar Chosŏn was neither linear nor obvious. Rather, it witnessed rifts and produced unevenness. Critical to my argument is a deeper understanding of the ways in which modern knowledge uses the imagined ‘family’, ‘women’, ‘Confucian practice’ of the Chosŏn period related to the modernist traditionalism and how the ‘state of Chosŏn’ did not become a major subject of historical research while ‘Confucianism’ in terms of tradition was emphasized.

JI YOUNG JUNG is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Ewha Womans University, Korea. She received degrees in history from Sogang University, Korea (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.). Her areas of research expertise is gender history, with a focus on the construction of gender and marginal women -widows, concubines, remarried women, single women in late Chosŏn, Korea. Recently her research focuses on the process of knowledge construction and consumption in the modern Korea regarding “women in Chosŏn”. She is the co-author of Women and Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (SUNY Press, 2011). Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen: Hidden Histories, Enduring Vitality (SUNY Press, 2011). She has also published widely on the gender studies, cultural history, and memory in East Asia.