Making Migrants: Policy Community Dynamics in Immigration and Citizenship in South Korea
Thursday, March 31, 2022
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT
Hybrid Event
Lindner Family Commons (Room 602)
Elliott School of International Affairs,
1957 E Street Northwest
Washington, DC 20052
**THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT. IN-PERSON TICKETS ARE RESERVED FOR GW STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND STAFF. For outside affiliations, there will be tickets available to attend virtually via Zoom.**
About the Event
In the early 2000s demographic decline pushed the South Korean national government to abandon its ethnonational citizenship policies and implement some of the most progressive immigration policies in East Asia. Yet closer scrutiny of the policies reveals differences in the rights, privileges, and duties extended to immigrants according to newly created migrant categories. In this lecture, Draudt draws two cases from her book project and compares the policymaking dynamics that produced two forms of “kinship migration” policies: diaspora return migrants and marriage migrants. Draudt shows how meso-level interactions among state and social actors categorize citizens and non-citizens according to extant membership frames—the laws, ideas, and institutions that historically situate a citizen within the nation. Based on original research from archival research, interviews, and immersive fieldwork in South Korea from 2017 to 2019, the research contributes to broader discussions of how policy community dynamics expand the rights and social benefits for some migrants and citizens while simultaneously excluding or restricting others.
Speaker
Darcie Draudt is a Postdoctoral Fellow for the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) and a Nonresident Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. A political scientist and foreign policy analyst, Dr. Draudt publishes broadly on South and North Korean domestic politics and foreign policy, inter-Korean relations, and US-Korea policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in Korean Studies from the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, and a B.A. with Honors in Anthropology from Davidson College. In 2021, Dr. Draudt was named one of the Next Generation Korea Peninsula Specialists at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. She previously was a visiting scholar at the Yonsei University Department of Political Science and a Korea Foundation dissertation fieldwork fellow. She was also a research associate for Korea Studies and the Program on US-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonresident James A. Kelly Korean Studies fellow at Pacific Forum, and a field researcher for the International Organization for Migration Research and Training Center in South Korea.
Moderator
Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. 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.
