Portraiture as Assemblages: Exploring Discourses About Children From Korean Marriage and Labor Immigrant Families

• In Event: 60.084 - Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 60.084-15 - Protagonists and Provocations in the Early Years

Abstract

Informed by works of Deleuze, Guattari, and Baktin, this paper investigates how various discourses about children from marriage and labor immigrant families in Korea influence and shape prevalent beliefs and practices in local and national societies. Recent years have seen a drastic increase in tensions and anxieties around racial and cultural heterogeneity in Korea through many outlets, including news reports, popular culture, and policy reports. By creating portraits of immigrant parents as assemblages demonstrating multiplicities of discourses and experiences in situ, the paper examines the data from diachronic ethnographic interviews and critical analyses of cultural artifacts. The study challenges simplistic binaries of adequate/deficient, normal/abnormal, and Korean/non-Korean with the purpose of creating space for open-ended interpretations of discourses about childhoods.

Author

• MinSoo Kim-Bossard, The College of New Jersey