Description

North Korea is a workshop of democracy in today’s world. The human rights of North Korean refugees define the global democracy project, while the marketization in North Korea is exalted as a forerunner of democratization. At this juncture, this talk construes North Korean refugees as the displaced from the common properties and state-assigned jobs and examines the consequent process of their commodification. It takes the memory of socialism as a site where the state and individuals reconfigure their relationship. In specific, the talk discusses the North Korean state’s double edged relation with the emergent capitalist order which prompts an inquiry into the reconstituted meaning of socialism. It also probes subjectivities of the displaced who respond to the trinity of the market, evangelism, and ethnic nationalism, and articulate memories of socialism in their imagination of the new common.

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Hyun Ok Park is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Desire for Return: Colonial Memory, Neoliberal Capitalism, and the Korean Transnational Migration.” 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).

Description

In the global north, falling birthrates, an ageing population, and increased women’s paid employment are creating a huge demand for child and elder care; while in the global south, growing unemployment and underemployment are pushing women to seek work abroad. In this symposium, we discuss how changes in fertility, ageing population and women’s employment patterns in Canada, Japan, and South Korea are driving up demands for care, how these governments are responding through immigration and employment policies, and what these changes mean for global migration.

KEYNOTE SPEECH
Shahra Razavi (Coordinator, Gender and Development, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD))

PANEL DISCUSSION
Moderator:
Ito Peng (University of Toronto)

Panelists:
Shahra Razavi (UNRISD)
Monica Boyd (University of Toronto)
Susan McDaniel (University of Lethbridge)
Hykyung Lee (Pai Chai University)
Wako Asato (Kyoto University)
Rachel Silvey (University of Toronto)

Description

The political foundation of North Korea, like those of Vietnam and China, is based on moral legitimacy deriving from the historical experience of armed resistance against colonial domination. However, North Korea is distinct from other Asian revolutionary postcolonial states in that its revolutionary heritage, in postcolonial history, has been increasingly reduced to a handful of historical actors and, ultimately, radically personified. This lecture will reflect on North Korea’s distinct political history with reference to two relevant ideas in historical sociology: Clifford Geertz’s “paradigm of the exemplary centre” and Weberian notions of political power and authority with which Geertz’s symbolic approach to power engages. It will ask what lessons we can learn from Weber’s treatise on the nature and historicity of charismatic authority in trying to come to terms with North Korea’s established stateliness and its contemporary political process.

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Heonik Kwon is reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics and has conducted fieldwork in Russian Siberia, central Vietnam and, most recently, in Korea. He is the author of Ghosts of War in Vietnam, which received the inaugural George Kahin prize in 2009 from the Association for Asian Studies, and After the Massacre, winner of the first Clifford Geertz prize in 2007 from the American Anthropological Association. His new book, The Other Cold War, was published in 2010 by Columbia University Press. Currently, Heonik Kwon directs an international collaborative research project on the contemporary histories of the Korean War supported by the Academy of Korean Studies.

Description

Michael Danagher entered the Trade Commissioner Service in 1987. Overseas assignments have included Lagos and Seoul, and, as Senior Trade Commissioner, at missions in Hanoi and Budapest. He is currently in his second assignment in Korea, as Minister-Counsellor and Senior Trade Commissioner. At headquarters, he has worked in the commodity trade policy division, Africa and Europe trade divisions, and as Deputy Director responsible for Taiwan affairs. More recently, he was responsible for the assignment process for the Trade Commissioner Service, and, prior to his current posting, was responsible for commercial relations with non-EU Europe and Central Asia. Mike has a BA from the University of Ottawa and an MBA from McGill University.

Description

During the Korean War, a particular figure of warfare took center stage at the armistice negotiations – the “prisoner of war.” Although scholars have often dismissed the POW controversy as a mere Cold War propaganda ploy mobilized by all sides involved, this talk will argue that the POW controversy revealed another significance to the Korean War as the debate brought the 1949 Geneva Conventions to a crisis. Claims to the legitimate interpretation and application of the “laws of war” were at stake – in essence, to define the prisoner was to define the war.
This talk will examine the stakes involved in the POW debate through more unexpected sites of analysis – practices of violence inside the POW camps, negotiations inside the interrogation rooms, and the production of a U.S. military bureaucratic archive around the POW. An analysis of how violence, interrogation, and bureaucracy formed the landscape on which the U.S. military attempted to form the figure of the POW is crucial to understand why on May 7, 1952, after “kidnapping” U.S. POW camp commander Brigadier General Francis Dodd, a group of thirty Korean prisoners of war made an initial request for 1,000 sheets of paper. The POW was an emphatically bureaucratic figure of war, and the POWs were asserting control over the bureaucratic procedures of defining the POW. As these POWs understood, the struggle over the legitimate forms of “war” on the global stage in the 1950s impacted what claims could be made on decolonization – the POWs themselves were making these claims alongside the delegates and military commanders, reconfiguring the landscape of violence, interrogation, and bureaucracy in their own attempts to intervene in the discourse of “war.”

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Monica Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Humanity Interrogated: Empire, Nation, and the Political Subject in the U.S.-controlled POW Camps of the Korean War, 1942-1960,” examines how POWs, military personnel, and government officials struggled to define the “prisoner of war” as a political subject during the early Cold War, as interrogation became the most relied-upon tool of the U.S. military for constructing, disciplining, and presenting the prisoner of war. She is currently a Graduate Student Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at Michigan for 2010-2011.