Making up the Multicultural Student through the Fabrication of Race and Racialization of Difference in South Korea

• In Event: International Studies of the Sociologies of the Knowledge of Science, Visual Cultures and Affective Economies in Education, Part II

Proposal

With the rapidly increasing global interconnections among nations, multiculturalism has been recognized as inevitable trends. Amid concerns over South Korea’s racial consciousness as a 'false sense of uniformity'— expressed by international organizations like the UN CERD and Amnesty International—multicultural education becomes a governing tool to demonstrate social commitment to justice, equity, and democratic advancement. This shift can be seen through the high rise in usage of the term 'multiculturalism' between 1990 and 2008. A few decades later, the existence of race becomes commonly accepted and the notion of racial difference acts as the racialization of humans with the double gesture of hope and fear for the multicultural population. As a response to this trend, multicultural education acts as a space of actions operating and producing biological-genetic knowledge and social science-statistical reasoning, embodying the nation’s hopes and fear for the uncertain future and actualization of a transnational trend. It creates a new way of “seeing” by differentiating, categorizing, anticipating, and educating people in a particular rationality and visibility of difference and diversity. This division of ideas becomes real in social science with the statistical reasoning of validating differences in academic achievement, self-esteem, career maturity, etc., between them. However, it is rare to question how these particular styles of reasoning and knowledge production in social sciences make kinds of people in multicultural education. This paper questions the technologies of making kinds of multicultural students through the knowledge production of racial differences in South Korean annual government policies since 2006 and the national discourse since the 1990s.

Authors

• Michael Shimoura, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Ji Hyun Hwang, The University of Wisconsin-Madison