Reading for resistance: Grassroots pedagogies in Korean youth activist reading circles

• In Event: Protest, Activism and Education

Proposal

Purpose
This paper examines pedagogical practices embodied in reading circles organized by Korean youth activists. The paper addresses the following research questions: How are pedagogies of resistance practiced in Korean youth activists’ reading circles? How do these pedagogical practices create transformative possibilities?

Context
Reading circles are grassroots learning spaces that have historically been a crucial part of South Korean student activism. They are sites of political education where student activists read and discuss critical texts together, developing critical consciousness and building counterhegemonic knowledge for their activism (Park, 2008). Korean student activists who led democratization movements against authoritarian regimes in the 1970s and 80s leaned on reading circles as a primary medium of political socialization (Lee, 2002). Reading circles are still widely adopted amongst youth activist organizations in Korea. These grassroots spaces engage in readings across a wide range of sociopolitical issues ranging from feminism, queer theory, labor rights, and social justice issues in South Korea. Reading circles are organized and led by youth activists themselves, who choose materials to read and take turns facilitating discussions of the texts.

Theoretical Framework
This paper is situated at the nexus of existing scholarships on the act of reading and on pedagogies of resistance in social movements. I first draw from De Certeau’s (1984) work on the subversive possibilities of reading practices. De Certeau (1984) argues that reading is not merely an act of passively receiving authors’ ideas – it opens up opportunities for readers to craft unorthodox knowledge through creative engagements with the text. In reading, the reader wanders through an imposed system of meaning but also creates something unknown in the space by producing their own novel assemblages of meaning (De Certeau, 1984). Rooted in the idea that reading can be an act of insinuating intellectual creativity from the margins (De Certeau, 1984), I explore subversive possibilities generated in Korean youth activists’ reading circles.
This paper also draws from studies on pedagogical practices and grassroots learning in activist spaces. Knowledge production within movements provides important critiques of dominant structures and creates radical visions for the world (Choudry, 2015). As such, scholars have called for studies that attend to critical pedagogies that are developed in social movements (Tarlau, 2015). In this regard, Jaramillo and Carreon (2014) and Bajaj (2015) studied pedagogies of resistance social movements, highlighting elements such as critical consciousness of inequality, understanding of one’s heritage, willingness to act for social change, and reciprocity and solidarity. As illustrated by these studies, activist spaces generate pedagogies that challenge the epistemological politics of dominant structures of power and engage with subaltern knowledge.

Methods
This paper is based on 17 semi-structured interviews with Korean youth activists conducted for two larger research projects. One project conducted in 2017 examined grassroots spaces of learning in Korean youth activism. Another project in 2019 explored how Korean youth activists’ educational experiences shaped their activist journeys. In both studies, youth activists between the ages of 18-29 who have been involved in activities that challenge structural oppression and injustices in South Korea were recruited to the study through purposive and convenience sampling. Interviews were conducted in Korean, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed.

Results
Through reading circles, student activists learn counterhegemonic knowledge that provided critical grounding for their resistance. Through these readings, they developed historical and sociopolitical consciousness of structural injustices and gained understanding of how resistance has taken place across time and space. Giju(pseudonym) said:
To be honest, I learned way more from reading books in student activist groups than from my professors… Putting studying for examinations aside, I started learning about topics I wanted to study such as human rights, disability rights, feminism, and contemporary Korean history. I became more interested in the struggles of people who were erased in history and decided to continue working in solidarity with people who are marginalized today.
Giju stated that she learned more from reading circles organized by student activist groups than from formal classes taught by professors, disrupting conventional notions of who gets to be seen as producers of knowledge. By engaging in histories of resistance and knowledge from the margins often erased in formal education, student activists like Giju started to challenge dominant knowledge taught in educational systems.
In addition to what is read, student activists engaged in disruptive possibilities by reconstituting how texts are read. Reading circles create a collective embodied experience by imbuing reading – an often individualized act – with sociality. Through experiences of reading together, exchanging thoughts, and grappling with texts in each other’s company, youth activists create a communal feeling – of making sense of the world together, of building critical discourse together, and of holding each other in the process. Reading circles are thus significant not only in terms of disrupting what texts are read but also in terms of crafting embodied practices in how people read. These communal embodiments offer transformative possibilities through enacting an otherwise – a community-based way of being and relating to each other. By reconfiguring reading from an act performed individually to an act performed in community, student activists move against individualization that creates distance and fractured relations. Molin(pseudonym) shared that her reading circle “read books and shared relevant experiences from our lives in community.” This practice respected the lived experiences of youth activists, allowing them to see knowledge as residing not only in books but also connected to the embodied experiences of youth activists. Reading circles created collective learning spaces where participants learned to recognize each other’s humanity. They strive to embody a community of solidarity and a different way of relating to each other and the world.


Significance
Reading circles functioned as spaces of everyday resistance where youth activists practice and realize their visions for the world. As a grassroots space of critical knowledge and subversive learning, reading circles cultivate powerful pedagogies for youth activists to challenge terrains of power. This paper is significant in documenting the pedagogical practices Korean youth activists engage in through their reading circles and illustrating how these practices plant seeds for transformative possibilities of resistance.

Author

• Woohee Kim, Harvard University