The Global Seminar in South Korea
“Dreaming, Mapping, Living: The City in the Korean Imagination” will be taught in Seoul, South Korea, at Ewha Woman’s University from June 20 to July 31. Led by Assistant Professors of East Asian Studies Joy S. Kim and Steven Chung, the seminar will introduce students to the rich living archives of cities in Korea.
Centered in the dense metropolis of Seoul, but radiating out to the ancient site of Kyongju and the bustling port of Pusan, this six-week seminar traces the transformations of Korean cities from the late-Chosŏn period through the early years of the twenty-first century, focusing on the sharp intellectual contests waged over their (re)construction and (re)imagination. Writers, filmmakers, and digital programmers have captured the protean and shifting life of Korean cities, imagining them variously as sites of utopian harmony, nihilistic alienation, bureaucratic control, and underground subversion. These official, quasi-official, and nonofficial visions, in turn inform the living experience of cities, drawing a map of the past and a dream of the future onto everyday life.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course asks students to consider a wide variety of issues that pertain to the city: the uses and abuses of the past; the meaning and function of modern infrastructure and architecture; the encoding of class, gender, and ethnic stratifications in urban planning; the psychic and affective experience of city life; and the significance and impact of creative arts within and about the city.
Classes, including instruction in elementary Korean, meet four days a week, Monday through Thursday. Students will be encouraged to explore the cities’ historic vestiges and contemporary conflicts through their lived experiences in Seoul as well as through exploratory trips throughout Korea. Shorter field trips will bring students to “satellite” cities in close proximity to Seoul, such as Inch’on, an industrial port with one of the oldest surviving Chinese ethnic enclaves, and Sangam, a newer master-planned suburb targeted primarily at upper-middle-class families. Longer field trips will explore the cities of Kyongju and Pusan. Guest lectures by local specialists in architecture, colonial history, and mass culture; special visits by writers and filmmakers; as well as community service, will supplement seminar meetings. The core of the seminar will be the daily resonance between the formal and rigorous instruction of the classroom and the direct and visceral experience of the cities themselves.
Internships in South Korea following the seminar are also available. For information, please visit the Web site of the International Internship Program.
Click here for the course syllabus.
This course fulfills the Social Analysis (SA) general requirement. Check back to view the syllabus.
