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2-day conference at the Nam Center for Korean Studies on Nov 8–9, 2024.

Location: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, or livestream on Zoom.

The conference program, speaker bios, and paper abstracts can be found here: https://myumi.ch/bE38y

Event Description:

While South Korea had long been the major source of emigrants fleeing poverty and political turmoil in their homeland, it has emerged since the early 1990s as one of the most popular migrant destinations in East Asia. The ethnic Korean population outside the Korean peninsula now includes not only the descendants of colonial-era migrants to Japan and Manchuria, but also the post-1960s emigrants to North America, a large size of adoptees in North America and Northwestern Europe, and educational migrants and Christian missionaries across the globe. Migrants in South Korea are equally diverse. They include: labor migrants in agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors; marriage migrants constituting the fast-growing “multicultural families”; asylum-seekers from across the world; and international students and English teachers recruited by educational institutions. North Korean and ethnic Korean migrants from China also constitute a significant portion of migrants in South Korea. This two-day conference will explore the politics of migration, diaspora, and race in transnational Korea—the topic that has moved Korean Studies in a transnational direction in the past decade or so. The approach will be interdisciplinary and comparative, with the panelists from sociology, anthropology, political science, and media studies, and with broader East Asia as a comparative horizon.

*** To virtual participants, the conference will be livestreamed (but not recorded), so please register in advance

*** Top photo is from Sharon Yoon, middle photo is from Nora Hui-Jung Kim and bottom from Young-A Park.