Sangsook Lee-Chung
I am a third year Ph.D. student in East Asian Languages and Cultures. I received my B.A. in Journalism (Sociology minor) from Ewha Womans University in Korea and completed my masterfs degree with an interdisciplinary focus on Korean cultural studies at The U of I in 2006. My research interests lie in modern and contemporary Korean Culture, with a special focus on the cultural identity of Korean intellectuals, families, and women. I am currently planning to take the preliminary exam this semester and refining my dissertation project. My dissertation research will explore the national, political, and cultural subjectivities of contemporary South Korean intellectuals whose social and cultural location has shifted as South Korea became a democratic civil society after 1987 and in the face of rapid globalization. In this project, I focus on a particular group of male South Korean professors who, I believe, powerfully show the ongoing struggles of South Korean intellectuals in the current moment: namely those who studied abroad in the United States and who are today so-called geese dads (kir?gi appa), namely for remaining alone in Korea as their wives and children head to the U.S. for early study abroad. I hypothesize that looking into the phenomenon of geese families, more specifically geese dad professors, offers an effective and powerful window on the cultural paradigm shift of South Korean intellectuals and that of the whole South Korean society in a broader sense. Intellectualsf geese family making can either be seen as an abrogation of the collective needs of South Korea or as an exemplar of new, transnational, and entrepreneurial modes of citizenship and cosmopolitan desire. And it also suggests that the existing boundary between the public and the personal in the past does not work anymore in a changing South Korean society. With this project, I am interested in how these intellectuals navigate this tension and negotiate their role as they narrate and manage their daily lives in the context of considerable public discourse about and often critique of the geese family phenomenon. Fall, 2008