Education, Capitalism, and Identity: Becoming Korean and American Neoliberal Subjects in an American High School

• In Event: 65.080 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 65.080-4 - Becoming Youth Activists Within the Anticolonial Borders of Indigenous and Transnational Lived Experiences

Abstract

This paper comes from a larger five-year long ethnographic study of the cross-national conflict caused by the escalating numbers of the Korean population in a Midwestern Christian high school. Through multiple qualitative case study analysis on four representative Korean international students’ educational experiences, I investigate how global educational migration collaborates with the spirit of capitalism and imperial ideology and makes a great impact on Korean international students’ daily experiences and thus their identity formation: How Korean students negotiate U.S. school cultures and their emergent bicultural identity, as well as how they are becoming neoliberal made subjects in two different systems. Adopting Foucauldian neoliberal governmentality, I demonstrate how each Korean student developed both a deeply felt inner and an instrumental/strategic identity.

Author

• Hye-Young Park, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign