“One Heart:” Toward a New Kingdom and a New Korea

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Religious Identity, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice

Abstract

Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in faith-based schools for North Korean-background youth, this paper shows how the Korean concept of maeum (heart/mind/spirit) links spiritual openness with the nation-building project of Korean unification. Korean Protestant pastors, NGO leaders, and educators frame even partial or ambivalent faith among North Korean–background youth as evidence of “open hearts,” casting political and religious meaning onto the lived experiences of displaced youth. This convergence of spiritual and national registers sustains a temporal logic of perpetual anticipation, enables unification to persist as an organizing logic even when politically foreclosed.

Author

• Noël Um-Lo, Teachers College, Columbia University