The unprecedented economic success of South Korea since the 1990s has led in turn to a large increase in the number of immigrants and foreign workers in Korean industries. This book describes and explains the experiences of discrimination and racism that foreigners and ‘new’ Koreans have faced in a multicultural South Korea. It looks at how society has treated the foreigners and what their experiences have been given that common discourse about race in Korea surrounds issues of Korean heterogeneity and pure blood nationalism. Starting with critiques of Korean scholarship and policy framework on multiculturalism, this book argues for the need to revisit the most fundamental aspect of multiculturalism: the host population’s ability to respect new comers rather than discriminate against them. The author employs a critical realist understanding of racism and attempts to identify long-lasting institutional factors which make Korean society less than welcoming ‘new’ or temporary Koreans. A large number of new reportages are identified and systematically analysed based on the principles of grounded theory method. The findings show that nouveau-riche nationalism and pure-blood nationalism are widely practised when Koreans deal with ‘foreigners’. As a newly industrialised and highly successful nation, Korean society is still in transition and treats foreigners according to economic standard of their countries of origin. As one of the very first books in English about foreigners’ experiences of Korean nationalism, multiculturalism and discrimination, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Sociology, Ethnic studies, Asian studies, Korean studies, Media studies and Cultural studies.

This handbook presents a comprehensive survey of the formation and transformation of nationalism in 15 East and Southeast Asian countries. Written by a team of international scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines, this volume offers new perspectives on studying Asian history, society, culture, and politics, and provides readers with a unique lens through which to better contextualise and understand the relationships between countries within East and Southeast Asia, and between Asia and the world. It highlights the latest developments in the field and contributes to our knowledge and understanding of nationalism and nation building. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book examines a diverse set of topics that include theoretical considerations on nationalism and internationalism; the formation of nationalism and national identity in the colonial and postcolonial eras; the relationships between traditional culture, religion, ethnicity, education, gender, technology, sport, and nationalism; the influence of popular culture on nationalism; and politics, policy, and national identity. It illustrates how nationalism helped to draw the borders between the nations of East and Southeast Asia, and how it is re-emerging in the twenty-first century to shape the region and the world into the future. The Routledge Handbook of Nationalism in East and Southeast Asia is essential reading for those interested in and studying Asian history, Social and Cultural history, and modern history.

This book explores 21st century Korean society on the basis of its dramatically transforming and rapidly expanding commercial funeral industry. With insights into contemporary Confucianism, shamanism and filial piety, as well as modernisation, urbanisation, the division of labour and the digitalisation of consumption, it is the first study of its kind to offer a sophisticated, integrated sociological analysis of how the commodification of death intersects with capitalism, popular culture and everyday life in contemporary Korea. Through innovative analyses of funeral advertising and journalism, screen and literary representations of funerals, online media, consumer accounts of using funeral services and other sources, it offers a complex picture of the widespread effects of economic development, urbanisation and modernisation in South Korean society over the past quarter century. In the aftermath of the Korean “economic miracle” novel ways of paying respect to deceased kin have emerged; using Max Weber's concept of “pariah capitalism”, Gil-Soo Han shows how the heightened obsession with and boom in the commodification of death in Korea reflects radical transformations in both capital and culture. Winner of Korean Education Minister’s Book Prize 2020

This book studies how the increase of visual representation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular racial project in contemporary South Korean media. It explores the moments of ruptures and disjuncture that biracial bodies bring to the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism, a South Korean national racial project that re-aligns racial lines under the nation’s neoliberal transformation. Specifically, Ji-Hyun Ahn examines four televised racial moments that demonstrate particular aspects of neoliberal multiculturalism by demanding distinct ways of re-imagining what it means to be Korean in the contemporary era of globalization. Taking a critical media/cultural studies approach, Ahn engages with materials from archives, the popular press, policy documents, television commercials, and television programs as an inter-textual network that actively negotiates and formulates a new racialized national identity. In doing so, the book provides a rich analysis of the ongoing struggle over racial reconfiguration in South Korean popular media, advancing an emerging scholarly discussion on race as a leading factor of social change in South Korea.

Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship. This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats.

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.

In an era when many young people feel marginalized and excluded, this is the first comprehensive, critical account to shed new light on the trouble of ‘belonging’ and how young people in schools understand, enact and experience ‘belonging’ (and non-belonging). It traverses diverse dimensions of identity, including gender and sexuality; race, class, nation and citizenship; and place and space. Each section includes a provocative discussion by an eminent and international youth scholar of youth, and is essential reading for anyone involved with young people and schools. This book is a crucial resource and reference for sociology of education courses at all levels as well as courses in student inclusion, equity and student well-being.

The Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource that explores the formation and transformation of Korean culture and society. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview on key topics, including: compressed modernity, religion, educational migration, social class and inequality, popular culture, digitalisation, diasporic cultures and cosmopolitanism. These topics are thoroughly explored by an international team of Korea experts, who provide historical context, examine key issues and debates, and highlight emerging questions in order to set the research agenda for the near future. Providing an interdisciplinary overview of Korean culture and society, this Handbook is an essential read for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well scholars in Korean Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Asian Studies in general.

This book explores the process of identity (re)construction among mixed-heritage children within the context of globalization through the lens of its intersection with Korean society. The volume illustrates how these multicultural children mediate hybrid social spaces and examines their personal approaches toward translating, resisting, and transforming the entanglements engendered in those spaces. By tracing the trajectories of their identity (re)formations over several years, the book details the paths these youths have taken to navigate diverse contact zones and cope with institutional regulatory mechanisms. It highlights that, in the face of prevailing social stigma, they actively involve themselves in political action in their day-to-day lives: they redefine what it means to be Korean and/but multicultural, challenge simplistic membership boundaries, and develop unique strategies to resist and subsist. These efforts to question the essentialist logic of authenticity demonstrate that these youths, situated at the convergence of globalization, migration, inequality, and political power, represent a challenge to both national and global orders. Arguing that ecological perspectives need to direct greater attention toward the political as well as the posthumanist dimensions of language, culture, and identity, this book is key reading for scholars in applied linguistics, intercultural communication, and Asian studies.

Global Asian City provides a unique theoretical framework for studying the growth of cities and migration focused on the notion of desire as a major driver of international migration to Asian cities. Draws on more than 120 interviews of emigrants to Seoul—including migrant workers from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, English teachers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, UK and USA, and international students at two elite Korean universities Features a comparative account of different migrant populations and the ways in which national migration systems and urban processes create differences between these groups Focuses on the causes of international migrant to Seoul, South Korea, and reveals how migration has transformed the city and nation, especially in the last two decades