Toward an undivided citizenship: Naturalized citizens expanding Korean unification education

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 1
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Reimagining Citizenship and Identity: Youth, Education, and Justice in a Globally Interconnected World

Proposal

In South Korea, unification education (UE) focuses on topics and values that promote public awareness and a shared vision of a peaceful, unified future for South and North Korea. It is part of the national curriculum, mainly in secondary social studies. The citizenship concept in UE, however, has noticeably been grounded in the context of native Koreans (Kim et al., 2019; Noh, 2018), making the voices of migrants the most underrepresented in Korean unification discourse. In this research, I aim to expand the citizenship boundary in UE by illustrating how naturalized citizens in South Korea understand their role in Korean unification based on their experiences and capacities to reframe the meaning of citizenship. This project is, in the long run, to prevent another division in a divided Korea through a more inclusive conceptualization of citizenship in UE.

To highlight the citizenship of naturalized citizens, I discuss Dewey’s (1916/2001) understanding of situation, which elicits questions about what it means to be a citizen and how people shape realities through interactions with others. To enrich Dewey’s perspective, I conceptually unravel two complementary strands of citizenship, both as embodied systemic practice (Bourdieu, 2021) and as transformative potential (Banks, 2020). This theoretical position assumes that citizenship is a way of living together. It is a democratic association between individual bodies and structure (Boisvert, 1998), whereby civic life becomes participatory rather than remaining in a didactic mode.

Specifically, I used Gee’s (2014, 2018) approaches to positive discourse analysis to study accounts from in-depth interviews with naturalized citizens in South Korea. These participants came from varied origins, ages, and educational experiences. While considering discourse as a historical and sociocultural practice capable of changing the norms and social order, I intended to explicate how naturalized citizens construct citizenship through their cultural, racial, and regional positionalities from non-Western countries. Yet, I also focused on their “challenging the naturalized common-sense position” (Bartlett, 2012, p. 215) to empower their presence in my research.

The findings show that naturalized citizens expressed their situation by comparing previous circumstances and experiences with newly acquired benefits and marginalization in South Korea. Based on this, they understood issues around Korean unification by ingrained memories of historical crises and conflicts in their native countries (e.g., the Vietnam War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, religious persecution, and regional and racial discrimination). Namely, their narratives generated spatial mobility (Roudometof, 2005), which de-territorialized them from the ethnocentric framework, leading them to collaborate with people with similar and different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

In the end, naturalized citizens created the inclusive dimension of citizenship. Their cross-cultural experiences challenged the movement of ethnonationalist pacifism that justifies in-group homogeneity against perceived global others. I thus conclude that dwelling in “international” intersects both the historical tensions and present struggles while capturing spatiotemporal, in-between, and polyphonic (Aoki, 2004; Pinar, 2023) dynamics of citizenship. By recognizing and providing opportunities to explore the middle ground between these axes, the curriculum of UE can contribute to a more undivided citizenship in the face of the fragmentation of the world.

Author

• Daeyoung Goh, The University of British Columbia