This book explores multiple fields and disciplines around the theme of South Korea’s engagement and exchanges with global society focusing on development cooperation, migration and the media.
The core of this volume is an analysis of South Korea’s engagement and reciprocity in global society that has developed out of the country’s shift from aid recipient and migrant sender to aid provider and migrant host. The contributions approach this through the three main aspects of overseas aid, cross-border contacts, and interplay of identities in the mediascape. These themes represent an interdisciplinary array of research that introduces and analyses interconnected and concurrent instances of reciprocity, convergence, tension, inclusion, or exclusion in navigating South Korea’s interactional relations with global society, spanning regions and countries including Africa, Asia, the USA, and Germany.
This book will be valuable reading to students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines including sociology, gender studies, ethnic studies, media studies, IR, and area studies, in particular Korean studies.
Introduction
Yonson Ahn
Part 1: Korea’s Involvement in Overseas Aid and Transition
1. Shaping the Humanitarian Arena: South Korean, American, and Christian NGOs in North Korea
Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings
2. Engagement and Encounters with the Global South through Saemaul Undong
Sabine Burghart
3. Ex-Periphery: South Korea’s Position vis-à-vis the Global Society
Irina Lyan
Part 2: Cross-Border Contacts
4. Negotiating Masculinity: Migrant Husbands and Cross-Border ‘Marrying up’
Seonok Lee
5. Interactions with Samaritans from the East: Emotion and Korean Nurses in Germany
Yonson Ahn
6. Gendering ‘Return’: Korean American Femininities in South Korea
Stephen Suh
7. Towards a Multicultural Knowledge Economy? Emerging Issues in Tech Incubation for Immigrants in South Korea
Felicia Istad
Part 3: Interplay of Identities in the Mediascape
8. Neocolonial Ambivalence and Race in 내일 지구가 망해버렸으면 좋겠어 (So Not Worth It)
David Oh
9. Construction of a ‘Western’ Model Minority in South Korean Television: Portrayals of Germans and Germany in 내 친구의 집은 어딘가 (Where Is My Friend’s Home?)
Tanja Eydam
10. Social Media as Vernacular Politics: YouTube Channels by North Korean Defectors in South Korea
Jinhee Park
Biography
Yonson Ahn is Professor, Chair of Korean Studies and Deputy Executive Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre of East Asian Studies (IZO) at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany.
