Exploring Tensioned Sense of Place of North Korean Youth Defectors

• In Event: Cases of Places: Place-Based Education and International Environmental Ed Approaches

Abstract

The study presents qualitative accounts of tensioned sense of place of North Korean youth defectors who live in South Korea and explores in what ways those youth experience tensions in their sense of place. Informed by phenomenology and ethnography, the study was carried out with 12 informants from the Crossroad School, an alternative high school for North Korean defectors. Employing positionality as analytic lens, we examine how two aspects of positionality – place identity and affordances of place—get played out in their tensioned sense of place. Based our preliminary analysis, we identify and further discuss those conditions that shape youth positionality: 1) leveraging place history, 2) environmental knowing, 3) environmental competence, and 4) developmental trajectory.

Author

• Miyoun Lim, Ewha Womans University