Korean Youth Activism and Education: Negotiating Knowledge and Power to Create New Sites of Learning

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Korean Educational Narratives: Negotiating Identity, Learning, and Activism

Abstract

This study focuses on how Korean youth create new sites of learning through their activism. The research analyzes how Korean youth activists negotiate established forms of knowledge and power in the educational system and how they exhibit agency in reframing and producing new ways of thinking about the world around them. Based on participant observations and interviews with 15 youth activists in Seoul, South Korea, this research illustrates that Korean youth activists create spaces of learning beyond formal classrooms where youth discuss and challenge structures of power. This paper illuminates the need to study youth activism as one of the diverse contexts in which education takes place.

Author

• Woohee Kim, University of Oxford