Fabricating "Multicultural" Students through Visual Techniques in a Globalized Digital Society: Focusing on South Korean Educational Discourses

• In Event: Visual Technologies as Narrativizing Making Kinds of People in Education

Proposal

Objectives
This study critically examines how visual techniques are used to engineer racialized identities within South Korea's multicultural educational discourse by visualizing racial and cultural differences and homogeneity, and creating classifications of people through imaginary borders. It questions the irony of teaching distinctions and boundaries in a digitizing society where interactions are increasingly diverse and borderless, aiming to understand how these visual techniques stabilize ideas of racialized identities in education and how multicultural discourse is either reinforced or neutralized by digital media.

Theoretical Framework
The study analyzes visual techniques used to fabricate racialized identities in South Korea's multicultural discourse, focusing on the implications of visuality. It examines the Korean minjok—encompassing race, ethnicity, culture, and spirit—narrative, which emphasizes ethnic homogeneity and national identity (Shin, 2006), and how this narrative has been adapted within multicultural discourse. Drawing from Foucault's "history of the present" (1977), the study critiques how visualizations create specific ways of seeing and identifying people, producing a visual biopower that enforces normative identities. It also considers how visual narratives shape ideas of race and culture (Mitchell, 1994) and social identities (Mirzoeff, 1999), highlighting the role of visual culture in education and media in co-constructing subjectivities (Friedrich, Corson, & Hallman, 2021). This framework emphasizes the importance of understanding how visualizations of racial and cultural ideas are enacted in a rapidly digitizing society.

Methods
The study analyzes educational materials from 2006 to the present, including curriculum revision documents, elementary and secondary textbooks, and multicultural program materials sponsored by the Ministry of Education in Korea. These resources were selected for their relevance to multicultural education and their visual depictions of racial and cultural differences and homogeneity. Using postmodern discourse analysis and visual cultural studies methods, particularly the "pictorial turn" (Mitchell, 1994), the study investigates how the minjok narrative visually fabricates multicultural students while both constructing and challenging these narratives through digital media.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The findings reveal that South Korea’s national curriculum has increasingly integrated diverse racial and ethnic representations through visual elements such as skin color, hairstyles, and clothing. Multicultural education materials often essentialize and exoticize differences, objectifying multicultural students as a new invention. Despite the removal of the term "single minjok," history curricula still emphasize Korea's singular lineage, reinforcing cultural and racial boundaries and promoting a narrative that victimizes Koreans under foreign power and preserves a pure single identity. Moreover, multicultural students are fabricated as responsible Korean-global citizens through programs like the global bridge initiative, yet their racial and cultural heritages are visualized with fossilized borders. While multicultural education has been promoted as a response to a rapidly digitizing global world to pursue diversity, it ironically essentializes racial and cultural border thinking, fabricating particular identities for students that contrast with the fluidity of digital media channels they encounter. This study implicates the need to rethink visual techniques that reinforce rigid identities and offers opportunities for alternative narratives in a digitizing society.

Author

• Ji Hyun Hwang, The University of Wisconsin-Madison