Speakers
Celeste Arrington, George Washington University
Patricia Goedde, Sungkyunkwan University
Erin Aeran Chung, Johns Hopkins University
Discussants
Hae Yeon Choo, University of Toronto
Paul Y. Chang, Harvard University
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Virtual Event via Zoom
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
In this webinar, co-editors Celeste Arrington and Patricia Goedde will introduce their new book Rights Claiming in South Korea (published by Cambridge University Press) with fellow chapter contributor Erin Chung (Johns Hopkins University). Sociologists Paul Chang (Harvard) and Hae Yeon Choo (University of Toronto) will discuss the edited volume’s findings and contributions to our understanding of rights-based activism in contemporary South Korea.
People in South Korea have defined and articulated diverse grievances as rights violations and engaged in claims-making to remedy them. In what institutional contexts does such rights claiming occur, and what sources of support are available for utilizing different claims-making channels? This edited volume illuminates rights in action by investigating how rights are interpreted and acted upon via petitions, court claims, protest, and other legal mobilization methods. Our research shows that rights claims are diversifying in Korea and opportunities and resources for rights claiming have improved. But obtaining rights protections and catalyzing social change remains challenging. Contributors from across the social sciences analyzed original interviews, court rulings and statutes, primary sources in archives and online, and news media coverage in Korean. The chapters uncover conflicts over contending rights claims, expose disparities between law on the books and law in practice, trace interconnections among rights and movements, and map emerging trends in the use of rights language. Case studies include women, workers, people with disabilities, migrants, and sexual minorities.
Since the book launch will be conducted virtually, most of the volume’s contributors will join the discussion from three continents.
Speakers
Celeste Arrington (left) is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and the Washington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.
Patricia Goedde (center) is a Professor at Sungkyunkwan University, School of Law, where she was also appointed Associate Dean of Academic Affairs (2016-2018). Dr. Goedde received a JD and PhD in Asian and Comparative Law from the University of Washington, School of Law. She is a member of the Washington State Bar Association, a board member of the Korea Human Rights Foundation, as well as a core faculty member of the Social Sciences Korea (SSK) Human Rights Forum. Dr. Goedde’s teaching and research subjects are in the areas of East Asian comparative law, international human rights law, public interest lawyering, transnational legal mobilization, clinical legal education, and North Korean legal studies.
Erin Aeran Chung (right) is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She previously served as the director of the East Asian Studies Program and the co-director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program. She specializes in East Asian political economy, international migration, and comparative racial politics. She has been a Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future Program Scholar, an SSRC Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo and Korea University, an advanced research fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and a Japan Foundation fellow at Saitama University. She also served on the Executive Committee of the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association and is currently co-editor of the Politics and Society of East Asia Elements series at Cambridge University Press. She is the author of Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Japanese translation published by Akashi Shoten, 2012) and Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She was recently awarded a five-year grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) to support the completion of her third book project on Citizenship, Social Capital, and Racial Politics in the Korean Diaspora.
Discussants
Hae Yeon Choo (left) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016), a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea: factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and hostesses at American military camp town clubs. Her research on gender, intersectionality, citizenship, and urban sociology has appeared in Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, positions: asia critique, Urban Studies, and Sexualities. Her current book project examines social activism in contemporary South Korea as sites of emergent critical social theory and new political imagination. She has also translated Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.
Paul Y. Chang (right) is an associate professor of sociology at Harvard University and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology and the Director of Undergraduate Student Programs at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He was the 2019-2020 Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979 (Stanford University Press 2015) and co-editor of South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (Routledge 2011). His research on social movements, state repression, and Korean society has appeared in several disciplinary and area studies journals. His current project explores the emergence of non-traditional family structures in South Korea, including single-parent households, single-person households, and multicultural families.
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University..
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