Deepening democracy within and beyond citizens' movement organizations in South Korea

• In Event: Protest, Democracy and Education

Proposal

This research centers the question of how activist-educators in Korea engaging in democratic citizenship education cultivate directions for social change from within and beyond citizens’ movement organizations. As this question calls for specific understanding of the trajectory of politics in Korea before and after democratization, I connect such manifestations of social movements in Korea as an effort to realize “real utopias” within a constrained political terrain that is still influenced by the remnants of the Cold War and shaped by the ways that institutional politics became estranged from general citizens and marginalized groups even after democratization. This research addresses educational activities developed through socio- historically embedded development of citizens’ movements in Korea, where a key identity that broadly encompasses a myriad of movements is an appreciation of the history of democratization and an awareness that “deepening democracy” is necessary for people to actually feel the substantive values of equality and freedom within their everyday lives. Educational activities by citizens’ movement organizations have developed in the name of “democratic citizenship education” in Korea, with a broad focus on enhancing the political participation of general citizens. The open-ended nature of citizens’ movements to continuously identify new issues of inequality and axes of marginalization not limited to class interests has increased the need for citizens’ movement activists to touch the lives of general people through democratic citizenship education. With the increase of network-based movement initiatives in the 2000s, citizens’ movement activists working within “traditional” citizens’ movement organizations increasingly faced the need to work from within but reach beyond their organizations.

This research connects the trajectories of adult education for democratic participation and activist-educators’ work at citizens’ movement organizations in South Korea with discourses on deepening democracy (Fung & Olin-Wright, 2003; Gaventa, 2006b) and envisioning real utopias (Olin-Wright, 2010; 2019). In particular, I focus on such education activities as a way to address the puzzle of how collective agency can be cultivated for social change. Social movement research on cultivating collective agency has proceeded in both directions of skepticism against organizations (e.g., Michels, 1915; Piven & Cloward, 1977) as well as viewing organizations as the basis for cultivating collective agency (e.g., Behrens et al., 2004; McCarthy & Zald, 1977; Osterman, 2006). However, how education activities create processes of “becoming” for both (potential) activists and social movement organizations have been overlooked in the social movement literature. I shed light on this dimension by focusing on the work processes of activist-educators and reconceptualizing the concept of “in-between space” from liminality literature (Bhabha, 1994) and cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 2014). Using institutional ethnography as the methodology and incorporating comparison across three cases, I engaged in 14 months of ethnographic research to answer the question of how activist-educators engaging in democratic citizenship education cultivate directions for social change from within and beyond citizens’ movement organizations which developed in South Korea since its democratization in 1987.

I compare three cases in this research which show different approaches to deepening democracy through education work. Democratic citizenship education activities at Academy Neutinamu of People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy eventually developed into a separate activity system in the organization, with education becoming a venue for activist-educators to experiment with new approaches to broaden the definition of democracy and activism within their organization to influence the wider society. Education activities at Gwangmyeong YMCA developed in relation to other organizations in the region, such as the publicly-funded Gwangmyeong Lifelong Learning Center. Heterogenous approaches to democratic citizenship education in the community led to an awareness of in-between space at the inter-organizational level. This case illuminates how activist-educators fill such in-between space at the community level to explicitly reclaim democratic citizenship education as “political education.” Activist-educators at Democratic Civic Education Project SIDE maximize the fluid nature of their organization to engage at local, municipal, and national levels of the state across the country. Seeping into invited spaces within state institutions, activist-educators focus on fostering individual experiences of democratic discussions and seek to make these invited spaces into in-between spaces for general people and activist-educators to participate. Whereas these cases differed in their approaches to deepening democracy and their engagement with the state, they share common mechanisms of activist-educators identifying in-between space between activities and seeking to fill in such space through their interpretations of how democracy can be deepened through education work.

This research adds to literature across several areas, including liminality, cultural- historical activity theory, real utopias, and social movements. I argue that an additional mechanism for explaining the emergence of “in-between space” is possible by drawing on the unit of activity from cultural-historical activity theory. This mechanism characterizes democratic citizenship education that has developed the unique trajectory of democratic development in Korea. Activist-educators in democratic citizenship education reflect on the extent to which democratic citizenship education activities as achievable options for real utopias are developing into viable and desirable alternatives against the elite-centered institutional politics in Korea, suggesting pathways that activists pursue real utopias. Lastly, through the work of activist- educators across citizens’ movement organizations, I argue that the main question for cultivating collective agency hinges upon how education processes develop across different organizational formats, rather than whether or not organizations are important for social movements.

Author

• Hye-Su Kuk, OISE, University of Toronto