The 90th Yonsei-Korea Foundation
Korean Studies Forum
presents

The Domestication of South Korean
Early Study Abroad (ESA)
in the First Decade of the Millennium
Dr. Nancy Abelmann
Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Illinois

TUESDAY / 6 PM / APRIL 28
Room 112, New Millennium Hall

The Korean Studies Program at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University, is pleased to invite you to attend the 90th Yonsei-KF Korean Studies Forum with guest speaker, Dr. Nancy Abelmann. The abstract of her paper and a brief bio, as well as a list of presenters for Spring 2009, can be found at the end of this email.

I hope you will come to enjoy the presentation and discussion. Please contact Kimberely Hall at 010-4800-4895 or kimhall@yonsei.ac.kr for further inquiries.

Sincerely,

Hyuk-Rae Kim
Professor of Korean Studies
GSIS, Yonsei University

NANCY ABELMANN, Ph.D., is the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She co-directs the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI, www.eui.uiuc.edu ). She has published books on social movements in contemporary South Korea (Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement, University of California Press, 1996); on women and social mobility in post-colonial South Korea (The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk and Class in Contemporary South Korea, University of Hawai'i Press, 2003); on Korean America Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots with John Lie, Harvard University Press, 1995); and on South Korean film with Kathleen McHugh, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Nation (Wayne State University Press, 2005). Forthcoming is The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation (Duke University Press, 2009), based on four years of transnational ethnography on the educational trajectories of Korean American public college students as they articulate with the educational histories of their emigre parents. With U of I colleague, Sumie Okazaki, she is working on Domestic Toil: How Korean American Teens and Parents Make Family Work based on field and survey research in Chicagoland.

ABSTRACT In this talk I examine a considerable shift in the newspaper discourse on South Korean early study abroad (chogi yuhak, ESA), the education exodus of pre-college students (mid-1990s -- present). In the early years of ESA, South Korean sustained a belief in the promise of alternative subject formation through ESA, namely that with time abroad young people's potential and character would be significantly altered. However, as early study abroad increased dramatically in the 2000s, the discourse came to assert that ESA success relies both on technical preparation at home and pre-existing character. This shift is a product of both escalating social and economic anxieties in post-IMF South Korea; and the maturation and escalation of ESA itself. In this way, I argue that ESA is domesticated; no longer depicted as a distinct or discrete education field abroad, but instead an extension of the highly stratified and competitive South Korean education market that demands precisely the same assets for success.

Note: The presentation schedule for Spring 2009 is as follows:

* May 19, 91st Forum:"The Second An Chungk^un of Korea and the Politics of Making a National Hero", Jane Kim, Korea Foundation Research Fellow, PhD Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles

June 2, 92nd Forum:"On Kang Kyong-ae and Her Act of Writing", Miryong Shim, Korea Foundation Research Fellow, PhD Candidate, Columbia University

*Please note the new changes to the schedule.

Graduate School of International Studies
Seoul National University