At the Intersection of Nationality, Citizenship, and Response-ability: Re/searching for Our Voice and Place

• In Event: Re/searching Response-ability in the Wake of Anti-Asian Hate Crime: A Wrestle of Korean American Educators

Abstract

In today’s transnational society, who counts as a “citizen” and who has responsibility and response-ability to voice and address inequity in a nation? Who are the “Americans” who can and should concern themselves with confronting violence against racially minoritized people? How can we as immigrants speak up against injustice despite our vulnerable legal and/or political status while navigating the feelings of gratitude and sense of indebtedness demanded of immigrants (Hong, 2020)? In this paper we, two Korean American early childhood educators, grapple with these questions to examine the relationship between nationality, immigration status, and the obligation and right of response-ability as immigrant teacher educators and researchers through our autoethnographic reflections (Chang, 2009).

Although Asian Americans are often expected to accept their ethnicity (Tuan, 1999), the process of grasping our entangled positionality as members of contemporary U.S. society has been a challenging endeavor, deeply affected by the model minority myth that “contradicts [our] own racialized reality” (Hong, 2020, p. 56). Drawing on “feminists’ epistemological stance on the personal as a site of knowledge production” (Rhee, 2021, p. 5), we share how our transnational life experiences are entangled with professional endeavors in research and teaching at U.S. universities. By establishing “fragile connectivities” in-between and throughout our “fragmented realities” (Rhee, 2021, p. 12), we explore embedded cultural and socio-political interrelations that ripple through personal and unacknowledged stories. Recognizing that “a story always starts before it can be told” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 4), we explore with prose, poetry, and images for our intentional re/memories (Rhee, 2021) of those stories that we are trained to overlook as academics.

Specifically, the first author deliberates on her experiences of being positioned as a “forever foreigner” (Tuan, 1999) at airport immigration inspections and juxtaposes that experience with how various borders are daily negotiated in classrooms. Reflecting on how a sense of belonging (or the lack thereof) is intertwined with racial relations and histories, this author considers educators’ roles and responsibilities in classroom communities where border crossing takes place on a daily basis by teachers, children and their families. The second author shares her process of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen after mulling it over for 15 years. Because South Korea allows dual citizenship for limited cases, she had to give up Korean citizenship by becoming a U.S. citizen. Examining the meaning of be(com)ing a (good) citizen, she critiques a “nationalistic patriotism” in political rhetoric (e.g., Make America Great Again) that instigates alienation and injustice. She reimagines citizenship education to promote children’s appreciation of “working for the betterment of all living beings” in their own place(s) while recognizing “connections to beings and places elsewhere” (Kissling, 2018, p. 7).

This paper serves as an impetus for making space for the rightful contributions made by educators and children and their families from diverse backgrounds to disrupting “the Master Narrative of American History” (Takaki, 2008, p. 4). Juxtaposing these autoethnographic accounts with other qualitative studies we have conducted, we also share our onto-epistemological struggles with this exploration of decolonizing research (Patel, 2016).

Authors

• MinSoo Kim-Bossard, The College of New Jersey

• Kyung Hwa Lee, University of Georgia