Through a critical examination of the Korean diaspora in transnational contexts as a case study, Korean Digital Diaspora: Transnational Social Movements and Diaspora Identity unmasks the process of how people of the diaspora have built social interactions and communication with others online, how they have orchestrated social movements, and finally, how they have narrated and reshaped their diaspora identities in their everyday lives. Utilizing an ethnographical approach, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and a field study in New York City and Philadelphia, Hojeong Lee delineates how digital media technology has expanded into a new form of diaspora, digital diaspora, within the Korean diaspora community, and how it has mobilized the social movements of Korean diaspora members. Accordingly, Korean diaspora members have begun to imagine their community as a transnational global diaspora. Korean Digital Diaspora concludes with an analysis of how the changed attitudes of diaspora members have also influenced how they define themselves and how they are reshaping their diaspora identities. This multi-site, three-year study reveals the nexus of media, individuals, and society, highlighting the transnational social movements of diaspora members.

This book analyzes digital media use in the context of social change and of identity construction, using the Korean digital diaspora as a case study. Hojeong Lee examines how digital media has impacted transnational social movements as well as reshaping individuals' cultural identities and their perspectives on their surroundings.

Since the Korean Wara the forgotten wara more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.

In this book, scholars from disciplines like anthropology, history, linguistics and philology engage with the subject of how Koreans who live outside Korea had to (re-)define their own distinct cultural life in a foreign environment. Most Koreans in the diaspora define themselves through their ancestry, their language and their religion. Language serves as a strong argument for defining one’s own identity within a multi ethnic society. Ethnic Koreans in the diaspora tend to cultivate their own very special dialects. However, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of China, most ethnic Koreans in Central Asia, Manchuria and Siberia came again into close contact with Koreans especially from South Korea. There is a certain desire amongst many ethnic Koreans to learn the standard Korean language instead of sticking to their own dialects. This volume investigates constructions of Korean diasporic identity from a variety of temporal and spatial contexts.

More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan today—the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous. This timely, interdisciplinary volume blends original empirical research with the vibrant field of diaspora studies to understand the complicated history, identity, and status of the Korean minority in Japan. An international group of scholars explores commonalities and contradictions in the Korean diasporic experience, touching on such issues as citizenship and belonging, the personal and the political, and homeland and hostland.

At the start of the twenty-first century challenges to the global hegemony of U.S. culture are more apparent than ever. Two of the contenders vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumers of culture (principally, popular culture) are India and South Korea. “Bollywood” and “Hallyu” are increasingly competing with “Hollywood”—either replacing it or filling a void in places where it never held sway. This critical multidisciplinary anthology places the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave), and the United States (the site of Hollywood) in comparative dialogue to explore the transnational flows of technology, capital, and labor. It asks what sorts of political and economic shifts have occurred to make India and South Korea important alternative nodes of techno-cultural production, consumption, and contestation. By adopting comparative perspectives and mobile methodologies and linking popular culture to the industries that produce it as well as the industries it supports, Pop Empires connects films, music, television serials, stardom, and fandom to nation-building, diasporic identity formation, and transnational capital and labor. Additionally, via the juxtaposition of Bollywood and Hallyu, as not only synecdoches of national affiliation but also discursive case studies, the contributors examine how popular culture intersects with race, gender, and empire in relation to the global movement of peoples, goods, and ideas.

This book examines key features, problems, and implications of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement, a historical cornerstone for democracy and social movements in South Korea. The Candlelight Movement brought profound social changes with important lessons and questions for scholars, practitioners, activists, and the public. To examine the full complexity of the movement, this edited volume utilises wide-ranging methodological and theoretical approaches, which include case study approaches, ethnography, survey, feminist film criticism, critical discourse analysis, and rhetorical criticism. Chapters place ‘communication’ at the centre of their analyses, calling attention to the mediated and mediatised, the performative and other discursive practices of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement. In doing so, the book discusses not only the usual players and factors – nor the institutions that exert their influence through democratic politics and the public sphere – but also the counter-public embracing new and social media, collective singing, the body, and performance, as their choice of political media. As such, this volume offers important insights into how communication plays a critical role in forming, moving, and transforming new social movements. The Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea will appeal to students and scholars of communication and media studies, political science, sociology, and Korean studies.

Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora moves past the conventional understanding of diasporic media as being for only diasporic communities to evaluate its broader role as media for all members of society

Digital Media, Online Activism, and Social Movements in Korea deepens the current understanding of online activism and its impacts on society by highlighting how various forms of social movements have been mobilized in Korea. Through exploring movements in Korea such as political participation based on SNS, the 2008 U.S. beef protests, and the 2016-2017 candlelight vigils, the contributors study the intersection of digital media platforms, current trends, and social, cultural, and political conditions within Korean society. Using a wide range of events and movements, this book analyzes how people have utilized the development of digital media to facilitate social movements and effect social change.

The essays in Click and Kin span the globe, examining transnational connections that touch in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere.