About this Event
The Korean peninsula exerts an outsized influence on almost every facet of the world today. South Korea has emerged as one of the largest economies in the world, whose exports include everything from advanced technologies to popular culture. North Korea remains an authoritarian regime, whose efforts to challenge its international isolation threatens to ignite a global conflict. The peninsula is thus a critical engine of the global economy and a volatile flashpoint of geopolitical tensions. It is too important to be overlooked, let alone ignored.
This series, Rethinking Korea: New Perspectives on a Critical Region, invites distinguished scholars of culture, transnational history, environment, and international relations to offer novel perspectives on Korea while situating its complex place within global developments. We invite speakers to share their work that will not only shed light on the internal dynamics and rich history of Korea but also explore the complex relationship between this critical region and the larger world.
The third lecture in the series will feature Dr. Eleana Kim. Eleana J. Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (Duke UP, 2022) and Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke UP, 2010), which was awarded the James B. Palais Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the Social Sciences Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She also co-edited, with David Fedman and Albert Park, Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell UP, 2023). She is the current President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and serves on the editorial boards of Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Korean Studies, and Critical Asian Studies.
Dr. Kim's talk will be titled, "De/Militarized Ecologies: Making Peace with Nature Along the Korean DMZ
." This talk traces the entwined histories of military violence and postcolonial modernization in East Asia and their effects on local and global ecologies. In analyzing avian migratory flyways and other multispecies relations, Kim unpacks the material, political, and ecological entanglements of the Korean DMZ within processes of militarized liberal capitalism. Her framework of "biological peace” offers a critical vantage point for conceptualizing peace beyond human politics, in the context of climate crisis, perpetual war, and ongoing militarization of the planet.
The speakers series is made possible by the South Korea Initiative Fund, which is dedicated to helping establish an institutional commitment to Korean Studies at Northeastern, offering financial support to students studying or working in Korea, and educating the community about important issues regarding Korea in the world.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Renaissance Park, Room 909, 1135 Columbus Avenue, Boston, United States
USD 0.00