Transforming Epistemic Landscape with Transpacific Liminality: Curriculum Making by Korean American Community Leaders

• In Event: Using digital technologies to foster equity, collaboration, and innovation in education in diverse contexts

Proposal

Introduction
Since World War II, the movement of people, resources, capital, and ideas between Asia and the United States has increased, with the Cold War further facilitating this process by expanding U.S. influence in Asia and the Pacific region (Kwon, 2021; Yoneyama, 2017). The geopolitical and economic dynamics in the Pacific offer a space for generating transnational knowledge and history that shape the lives of people across the Asia-Pacific, including Korean (im)migrants in the United States, or Korean Americans, as explored in this study. By situating our inquiry in this context, the current study aims to (re)conceptualize leadership as the transformation of the epistemic landscape in education through the voices of Korean American leaders who engage in generating and disseminating historically informed, community-centered knowledge.
While existing scholarship on leadership often focuses on the transformation of unjust systems, structures, or practices (e.g., Khalifa, 2018; Shields, 2017; Theoharis, 2007), a critical gap remains in addressing epistemic injustice in leadership theories and practices that do not necessarily center immigrant communities as agentic knowledge givers and creaters. This study seeks to fill this gap by addressing the research question: How do Korean American community leaders create and develop curricula that center on the histories and knowledges (as plural) experienced by their communities? As digital communication and interactions among transnational communities have become more active and vibrant since the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings speak to the 2025 CIES theme of "Envisioning Education in a Digital Society" through the lens of leadership that transcends boundaries.

Theoretical Framework
As noted by Fricker (2015), epistemic contribution is essential to human capability, as human subjectivity is shaped not just by receiving but also by generating and sharing epistemic resources. However, epistemic contributions to leadership from racialized and immigrant communities, such as Korean American communities in the United States, are often unrecognized and neglected due to deficit views and systemic oppression.
We frame our inquiry within the concept of transpacific decoloniality (Hoskins & Nguyen, 2014; Kwon, 2021; Yoneyama, 2017), emphasizing the dynamic movements of people, ideas, culture, and capital in the transpacific as a significant space of interaction over the past century (Hoskins & Nguyen, 2014). This notion of transpacific carries connotations of development, exploitation, and hierarchy, intersecting with regional, national, racial, class, and gender lines, transcending a single-nation, area-based approach (Hoskins & Nguyen, 2014; Yoneyama, 2017). It also recognizes the enduring colonial legacy and ongoing struggles intertwined with the histories of imperialism, colonization, and the Cold War in postcolonial contexts (Kim, 2022; Kwon, 2021; Yoneyama, 2017).
Given this context, our study draws on a conceptual framework theorizing curriculum making as transformative epistemic agency. We developed our framework informed by scholarship on curriculum making (Cruz, 2012; Priestley & Philippou, 2018) and transformative agency (Stetsenko, 2019, 2020) to analyze how Korean American leaders transform the epistemic landscape through community organizing. We situate curriculum making within the community-driven leadership praxis beyond formal school systems and education policy and understand it through radical-transformative agency (Anna Stetsenko, 2019, 2020). Radical-transformative agency blends ethics, ontology, and epistemology, implying that knowing, being, and doing are interconnected in the fight for social justice (Stetsenko, 2020). At the core of this agency is the development of critical consciousness—a deep awareness of systemic oppression and the ability to challenge it (Freire, 2018; Solórzano & Bernal, 2001). Furthermore, Stetsenko (2020) underscores the significance of an ethico-onto-epistemology and the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS), which view research and knowledge production as inherently activist pursuits aimed at challenging the status quo and promoting social change.

Methods
To generate data, we used the life history method, which allows us to explore participants' racialized experiences and civic engagement through the dialectical relationship between the individual self and sociohistorical contexts (Munro, 1998). For the broader project underpinning this study, we recruited 17 participants who identify as Korean American/migrant community leaders actively engaged in civic activities through both formal and informal educational organizations in California, the DMV (Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia), and New York/New Jersey in the U.S. We conducted 1-2 in-depth interviews with each participant (totaling 22 interviews), amassed 50 hours of observations of community events led by our participants (e.g., protest organizing, community workshops, keynote speeches), and collected artifacts between May 2023 and June 2024. We analyzed the data using narrative analysis, focusing on events, actions, and happenings to achieve the "configuration of the data into a coherent whole" (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 15). We read all transcripts, field notes, and artifacts to identify elements for plotting each participant's story, followed by thematic analysis and narrative smoothing to create cohesive narratives.

Findings
Our findings illuminate the strategies employed by Korean American leaders to generate community-centered knowledge for social change. Our participants mobilized their racial/ethnic identities and cultural resources to identify epistemic injustice that invisibilizes the ontology and epistemology of Korean Americans. Their refusal to be mere receivers of knowledge created by others led to the cultivation of a collective space where they developed curricular agency and generated a new system of knowledge. In doing so, they led and organized curriculum-making by searching for and collecting local histories experienced by individuals and groups as situational knowledge that speaks to the communities they serve. These processes of curriculum-making highlighted their border-crossing transformative agency, catalyzed by their ways of being and living through and with transpacific liminality.

Conclusion and Significance
Based on these findings, we argue that curriculum-making is a core aspect of leadership that transforms epistemic dimensions toward historically just and community-centered social change. This study thus contributes to the scholarship of educational leadership by integrating discourses on curriculum-making and leadership praxis. The findings also highlight asset-based approaches to racialized immigrant communities and their knowledge, offering a reconceptualization of leadership.

Authors

• Taeyeon Kim, University of Nebraska - Lincoln (Department of Ed Admin)

• Soo Bin Jang, University of Delaware