The Journal of Korean Studies 

About: The Journal of Korean Studies is an academic journal published by Rowman & Littlefield. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Colonialism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0731-1613. Over the lifetime, 439 publications have been published receiving 2129 citations. The journal is also known as: Journal of Korean Studies.

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (review)

Abstract: South Koreans in the Debt Crisis is a detailed examination of the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001). Jesook Song argues that while the government proclaimed that it would guarantee all South Koreans a minimum standard of living, it prioritized assisting those citizens perceived as embodying the neoliberal ideals of employability, flexibility, and self-sufficiency. Song demonstrates that the government was not alone in drawing distinctions between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Progressive intellectuals, activists, and organizations also participated in the neoliberal reform project. Song traces the circulation of neoliberal concepts throughout South Korean society, among government officials, the media, intellectuals, NGO members, and educated underemployed people working in public works programs. She analyzes the embrace of partnerships between NGOs and the government, the frequent invocation of a pervasive decline in family values, the resurrection of conservative gender norms and practices, and the promotion of entrepreneurship as the key to survival. Drawing on her experience during the crisis as an employee in a public works program in Seoul, Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts of the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programs. She focuses specifically on efforts to help two populations deemed worthy of state subsidies: the “IMF homeless,” people temporarily homeless but considered employable, and the “new intellectuals,” young adults who had become professionally redundant during the crisis but had the high-tech skills necessary to lead a transformed post-crisis South Korea.

The Domestication of South Korean Pre-College Study Abroad in the First Decade of the Millennium

Abstract: This essay examines a shift in the newspaper discourse on South Korean pre-col- lege study abroad (chogi yuhak)—the education exodus of pre-college students— in order to consider how South Koreans are managing the considerable social pressure to globalize their children. While in the early years of Pre-College Study Abroad (PSA) in the 1990s, there was a robust media discourse about the promise of alternative human development through PSA, as the phenomena grew dramatically into the 2000s, the discourse increasingly asserts that PSA success relies on techni- cal preparation at home, the student's pre-existing character, and parental assets. PSA has thus been "domesticated" in that it is understood not as a discrete educa- tion field abroad, but instead an extension of South Korea's highly stratified and competitive education market. This shift reflects escalating social and economic anxieties, and as such, the discourse constitutes a conversation about inequality in contemporary South Korea.

Contention in the Construction of a Global Korean Community: The Case of the Overseas Korean Act

Abstract: Amid great controversy , the South Korean National Assembly passed the Overseas Korean Act (OKA) on December 3 , 1999. The benefits, which resemble quasicitizenship rights, are justified by the South Korean government's drive to redefine and reconstruct Korean identity in the context of an increasingly globalized world. Certain overseas Korean groups are legally included as (quasi) members of the South Korean nation-state, whereas other groups remain legal outsiders. Many people argue that the OKA defines "Korean identity " through technical and legal connections to the nation-state, South Korea, which in turn has larger implications for who does and does not constitute a Korean. Thus, the debate revolves around the confounded notions of national/legal/ethnic identities. Utilizing survey data and qualitative interviews, this article delineates the relationship between the South Korean government's efforts to legally define Korean identity and a Korean diasporic community's challenge based on ethnic homogeneity. Findings indicate that there is contention over not only the criteria by which one is defined as " Korean , " but also over the legitimacy of actors privileged to make such distinctions. We also point to the importance of considering historical experiences and geopolitics in shaping identity politics in the current context. Over the last few decades, rapid globalization has generated tremendous changes in various boundaries at local, regional, and global levels. In the face of globalization, many nation-states have engaged in new nation- and community-building processes, which have taken diverse forms and characteristics. In recent years, many nation-states' new nation-building efforts

The South Korean Bourgeoisie: A Class in Search of Hegemony

Abstract: If Marx and Engels had ever turned their attention to Korea, they might well have characterized die contemporary Korean state of their time as a committee for managing the common affairs of the yangban. And with good reason. The yangban aristocracy exercised an extraordinary degree of influence over both their state and society. Not only did they own much of the land, the main form of wealth; through their control and manipulation of the state civil service examinations, strategic intermarriage (including the provision of royal consorts), and the formation of active yangban associations at the local level, they were also able to maintain a position of political power from one generation to the next that invariably rivaled, and not infrequently surpassed, the power of the Chosön kings. Such wealth and power, moreover, were sustained within the society as a whole by occasional top-down marginal adjustments and reforms in the distribution system, and by widely diffused Neo-Confucian cultural and ideological

The Meanings and Significance of So Wŏls "Azaleas"

Abstract: One critic has observed that the poet Kim So Wol (1902-34) seems aware of the "barred possibilities" in the period of the Japanese occupation, but that his poetry "seems to be merely a gesture of desperation; it never becomes an energetic pursuit of an answer."1 This surely is criticism at its most severe, taking the poet to task for failing to pursue in poetry what the Korean nation, despite the determination expressed in the independence demonstrations in 1919, could not itself sustain. Literature as sympton, cause, or cure: it is excessive indeed to read Korean social history in terms of its poets, but no more so than to read the literary text as a document in So Wol's case of failed individual or national nerve.