Managing Difference through Affective Economies: Governing Multicultural Subjectivities of Happiness and Anxiety in South Korean Education

• In Event: Politics of Affect: The Technologies of Governance in Making Normative Subjectivities in Education

Abstract

Objectives
This study critically examines how affective practices within South Korean multicultural education actively produce and stabilize racialized cultural differences and diversity. While South Korea’s multicultural education emphasizes inclusion and cultural diversity, critiques highlight persistent contradictions within these policies. Drawing on the concepts of visuality and affective economies, this study interrogates how educational policies, textbooks, and visual materials fabricate multicultural identities that are simultaneously desired and rejected. Specifically, the analysis explores how affective intensities circulate through visual images, curricular narratives, and statistical representations, producing complex emotional dynamics that govern multicultural subjectivities. In doing so, the study aims to unpack how normative ideals of diversity, framed through notions of harmonious coexistence and inclusive national belonging, are affectively constituted, managing racial–cultural difference through seemingly inclusive or equity-oriented visual and affective strategies.

Theoretical Framework
The study combines theories of visuality and affect to analyse the production of racial–cultural difference. Visuality, drawing on Rancière (2004) and Mirzoeff (2011), is treated as a political, relational practice that structures visibility and identity through historically embedded power dynamics. Affect theory, informed by Ahmed’s (2004, 2010) concept of affective economies and Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism, foregrounds how embodied intensities and emotional resonances shape lived experiences of diversity. Within this framework, racial–cultural identities are understood as continuously produced through visual–affective interactions rather than as inherent givens.

Data and Methods
Anchored in visual discourse analysis (VDA), this inquiry treats visual elements (images, captions, layouts, statistical tables) as nodes in a discursive network materializing racialized feelings. Using affective attunement (e.g., memo-writing focused on bodily sensations elicited by visuals), the study traces circulating affects of happiness, anxiety, pride, and nostalgia. The corpus comprises national multicultural education policies (2006–2025), supplementary materials from the National Center for Multicultural Education, and government-authorised textbooks (2019 onward).

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The analysis identifies how historical narratives of ethnic unity and the inclusive exclusion of pride and victimized han are reiterated in textbook chronicles, visually juxtaposing heroic ancestors and hostile outsiders. These narratives attach pride to “we Koreans” while relegating multicultural students to an ambivalent space. Additionally, institutional classifications of multicultural bodies through policy tables and infographics quantify pupils by parental nationality, naturalizing phenotype as inherent difference. Such diagrams oscillate between hopeful tropes of global connectivity and fears of cultural dilution, fabricating multicultural students as simultaneously national assets and potential risks. Furthermore, inclusive textbook images exemplify exoticized imagery and the paradox of happiness. Happiness thus functions as a moral injunction, where students unable to perform cheerful harmony are problematized. Posters featuring globe-clutching teenagers illustrate cosmopolitan imaginaries, projecting cosmopolitan competence onto multicultural bodies and saturating them with aspirational optimism. Yet this optimistic attachment becomes cruel, as relentless demands for linguistic excellence and cultural brokerage intensify precarity and erase lived complexity. This study moves multicultural education debates beyond representational critique, demonstrating how governing through feeling (re)produces racialization within egalitarian rhetoric. Integrating visuality and affect theory, this work contributes to global conversations on postcolonial governance by unsettling western modern conceptions of diversity.

Author

• Ji Hyun Hwang, University of Wisconsin - Madison