North Korea may be known as the world's most secluded society, but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in 2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That number has grown tremendously in just over a decade, with over 7 million registered as of 2022. This expansion took place amid extreme economic hardship and the ensuing possibilities of destabilization. Against this social and political backdrop, Millennial North Korea traces how the rapidly expanding media networks in North Korea impact their millennial generation, especially their perspective on the outside world. Suk-Young Kim argues that millennials in North Korea play a crucial role in exposing the increasing tension between the state and its people, between risktakers who dare to transgress strict social rules and compliant citizens accustomed to the state's centralized governance, and between thriving entrepreneurs and those left out of the growing market economy. Combining a close reading of North Korean state media with original interviews with defectors, Kim explores how the tensions between millennial North Korea and North Korean millennials leads to a more nuanced understanding of a fractured and fragmented society that has been frequently perceived as an unchanging, monolithic entity.
Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime. As a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, Kim Yong enjoyed unprecedented privilege in a society that closely monitored its citizens. He owned an imported car and drove it freely throughout the country. He also encountered corruption at all levels, whether among party officials or Japanese trade partners, and took note of the illicit benefits that were awarded to some and cruelly denied to others. When accusations of treason stripped Kim Yong of his position, the loose distinction between those who prosper and those who suffer under Kim Jong-il became painfully clear. Kim Yong was thrown into a world of violence and terror, condemned to camp No. 14 in Hamkyeong province, North Korea's most notorious labor camp. As he worked a constant shift 2,400 feet underground, daylight became Kim's new luxury; as the months wore on, he became intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions. After years of meticulous planning, and with the help of old friends, Kim escaped and came to the United States via China, Mongolia, and South Korea. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, his story not only testifies to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence but also illuminates the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable hardship. Like the work of Solzhenitsyn, this rare portrait tells a story of resilience as it reveals the dark forms of oppression, torture, and ideological terror at work in our world today.
Korea has fully stepped onto the global stage in stunning strides. From the Oscar-winning film Parasite to the pop juggernaut known as BTS, Korean popular culture has taken the world by storm. This new Korean wave has influenced global tastes in drama, music, fashion, and can even be seen in the beauty industry’s obsession with Korean skincare products—Korea is everywhere. At the top of this list of greatest hits is Squid Game, a genre-bending Netflix series that has ignited social media platforms and inspired armies of devoted fans around the world. The seeds for a deep collaborative relationship between Netflix and K-drama had been sown long before the phenomenal success of Squid Game, but what particular social conditions allowed for this show to speak viscerally to global audiences today as the most-watched drama in ninety countries? In Surviving Squid Game, scholar of Korean pop culture Suk-Young Kim throws back the curtain to reveal the multiple factors accounting for the global dominance of K-culture. It investigates the origins, manifestations, and future prospects for this cultural trailblazer, making it essential reading for both content creators and fans of Korean culture across all media.
“A glittering glimpse into a pure realization of late capitalism, and . . . our collective future . . . .uncovers why K-pop is the global cultural phenomenon.” —Carol Vernallis, author of Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema 1990s South Korea saw the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government, from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial hub, and from a cloistered society to a more dynamic transnational juncture. In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media. Based on in-depth interviews with K-pop industry personnel, media experts, critics, and fans, as well as archival research, K-pop Live explores how the industry has managed the tough sell of live music in a marketplace in which virtually everything is available online. Teasing out digital media's courtship of "liveness" in the production and consumption of K-pop, Kim investigates the nuances of the affective mode in which human subjects interact with one another in the digital age. Observing performances online, in concert, and even through the use of holographic performers, Kim offers readers a step-by-step guide through the K-pop industry's variegated efforts to diversify media platforms as a way of reaching a wider global network of music consumers. In an era when digital technology inserts itself into nearly all social relationships, Kim reveals how "what is live" becomes a question of how we exist as increasingly mediated subjects. “Lively insights into the complexities of the artistry and the commerce, the manufactured and the impromptu, the virtual and the somatic, and the local and the global that propel the production [and] consumption of Korean popular music today.” —Hyung-Gu Lynn, University of British Columbia
The Korean demilitarized zone might be among the most heavily guarded places on earth, but it also provides passage for thousands of defectors, spies, political emissaries, war prisoners, activists, tourists, and others testing the limits of Korean division. This book focuses on a diverse selection of inter-Korean border crossers and the citizenship they acquire based on emotional affiliation rather than constitutional delineation. Using their physical bodies and emotions as optimal frontiers, these individuals resist the stateÕs right to draw geopolitical borders and define their national identity. Drawing on sources that range from North Korean documentary films, museum exhibitions, and theater productions to protester perspectives and interviews with South Korean officials and activists, this volume recasts the history of Korean division and draws a much more nuanced portrait of the regionÕs Cold War legacies. The book ultimately helps readers conceive of the DMZ as a dynamic summation of personalized experiences rather than as a fixed site of historical significance.
Peace in the Korean peninsula is impossible without Peace in Asia, and Peace in Asia will become the pathway to world peace. Until now, numerous books, related to the division of the Korean peninsula and reformation of the political system after the unification, have been published. However, no one in the world actually suggested a peaceful method or a specific road map that could lead to unification. This book is the road map. I have a special reason for feeling this way. Korea, my homeland, has kept a special place in my heart before I can remember. My homeland is Korea - a peninsula divided across its middle into north and south. I have long dreamed of reconnecting this land, making her one country and one nation. For a long time, this has been the dream after which I have most desperately sought.
A “mesmerizing” novel of a love triangle and a mysterious disappearance in South Korea (Booklist). In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same beguiling drifter, Se-yeon, who gives herself freely to both of them. Then, just as they are trying desperately to forge a connection in an alienated world, Se-yeon suddenly disappears. All the while, a spectral, calculating narrator haunts the edges of their lives, working to help the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. When Se-yeon reemerges, it is as the narrator’s new client. Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself is a dreamlike “literary exploration of truth, death, desire and identity” (Publishers Weekly). Cinematic in its urgency, the novel offers “an atmosphere of menacing ennui [set] to a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen tunes” (Newark Star-Ledger). “Kim’s novel is art built upon art. His style is reminiscent of Kafka’s and also relies on images of paintings (Jacques-Louis David’s ‘The Death of Marat,’ Gustav Klimt’s ‘Judith’) and film (Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Stranger Than Paradise’). The philosophy—life is worthless and small—reminds us of Camus and Sartre, risky territory for a young writer. . . . But Kim has the advantage of the urban South Korean landscape. Fast cars, sex with lollipops and weather fronts from Siberia lend a unique flavor to good old-fashioned nihilism. Think of it as Korean noir.” —Los Angeles Times “Like Georges Simenon, [Kim’s] keen engagement with human perversity yields an abundance of thrills as well as chills (and, for good measure, a couple of memorable laughs). This is a real find.” —Han Ong, author of Fixer Chao
This volume is a collection of six essays that Dr. Kim published in various journals over the past several years. They represent the early period of Dr. Kim's theological journey into Christian faith as a Korean Christian or, more broadly, an East Asian Christian. These essays deal primarily with religio-cultural themes related to my existential situation. Ð from the Preface
“Her fiction is a breath-taking piece of a cinematic art itself. Reminiscent of the world we experienced in Matrix, Inception, and Dark City, still it leads us to this entirely original structure, which is a ground-breaking, mystic literary and cinematic experience. Indeed, powerful and graceful.”—Bong Joon-ho, Oscar-winning director of Parasite In this mind-expanding work of speculative fiction, available in English for the first time, one of South Korea’s most treasured writers explores the driving forces of humanity—love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence—in two pairs of thematically interconnected stories. Two worlds, four stories, infinite possibilities In “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way,” an engaged couple coordinate their separate missions to distant corners of the galaxy to ensure—through relativity—they can arrive back on Earth simultaneously to make it down the aisle. But small incidents wreak havoc on space and time, driving their wedding date further away. As centuries on Earth pass and the land and climate change, one thing is constant: the desire of the lovers to be together. In two separate yet linked stories, Kim Bo-Young cleverly demonstrate the idea love that is timeless and hope springs eternal, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges and the deepest despair. In “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life,” humanity is viewed through the eyes of its creators: godlike beings for which everything on Earth—from the richest woman to a speck of dirt—is an extension of their will. When one of the creations questions the righteousness of this arrangement, it is deemed a perversion—a disease—that must be excised and cured. Yet the Prophet Naban, whose “child” is rebelling, isn’t sure the rebellion is bad. What if that which is considered criminal is instead the natural order—and those who condemn it corrupt? Exploring the dichotomy between the philosophical and the corporeal, Kim ponders the fate of free-will, as she considers the most basic of questions: who am I?
Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Age: The Korean Community in the Nation’s Capital examines the durable ties immigrants maintain with the home country and focuses in particular on their transnational cultural activities. In light of changing technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICTs), which enable a faster, easier, and greater social and cultural engagement with the home country, this book argues that middle-class immigrants, such as Korean immigrants in the Washington-Baltimore region, sustain more regular connections with the homeland through cultural, rather than economic or political, transnational activities. Though not as conspicuous and contentious as other forms of transnational participation, cultural transnational activities may prove to be more lasting and also serve as a backbone for maintaining longer-lasting connections and identities with the home country.
In Second-Generation Korean Experiences in the United States and Canada, Pyong Gap Min and Samuel Noh have compiled a comprehensive examination of 1.5- and second-generation Korean experiences in the United States and Canada. As the chapters demonstrate, comparing younger-generation Koreans with first-generation immigrants highlights generational changes in many areas of life. The contributors discuss socioeconomic attainments, self-employment rates and business patterns, marital patterns, participation in electoral politics, ethnic insularity among Korean Protestants, the relationship between perceived discrimination and mental health, the role of ethnic identity as stress moderator, and responses to racial marginalization. Using both quantitative and qualitative data sources, this collection is unique in its examination of several different aspects of second-generation Korean experiences in the United States and Canada. An indispensable source for those scholars and students researching Korean Americans or Korean Canadians, the volume provides insight for students and scholars of minorities, migration, ethnicity and race, and identity formation.
Korea has been going through major changes since 1992, including a civilian government, opening of financial markets, restructuring of chaebols, changing roles of women, and new relations with North Korea. There have also been cultural changes which reflect on the Korean way of doing business and of living. The knowledge and skills for coping with these changes need to be mastered by those who want to interact with Koreans. The need for interpersonal relationships and good communication should be emphasized. Case studies and examples are used to illustrate effective transcultural management and communications. This is a reference to understanding changing cultures and business practices in Korea for scholars, and a comprehensive guide to Korean business practice, protocol, and communications styles for professionals. Western professionals doing business in Korea will find this material important in their business operations, communications, and interpersonal relations with Koreans. Other Asian business professionals will find the work useful in providing an insight to both the Western and Korean cultures. Scholars and students in Asian studies, Korean studies, and international business areas will find beneficial information.
This case study examines country-level primary health care (PHC) systems in the Republic of Korea in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and April 2022. The case study is part of a collection of case studies providing critical insights into key PHC strengths, challenges and lessons learned using the Astana PHC framework, which considers integrated health services, multisectoral policy and action, and people and communities. Led by in-country research teams, the case studies update and extend the Primary Health Care Systems (PRIMASYS) case studies commissioned by the Alliance in 2015.
North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way." ---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University "One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, and cultural materials. Film and theatre are not the only arts Kim studies---she also offers an excellent analysis of paintings, fashion, and what she calls 'everyday performance.' Her analysis is brilliant, her insights amazing, and her discoveries and conclusions always illuminating." ---Patrice Pavis, University of Kent, Canterbury No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. Author Suk-Young Kim explores how sixty years of state-sponsored propaganda performances---including public spectacles, theater, film, and other visual media such as posters---shape everyday practice such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, Illusive Utopia shows how the country's visual culture and performing arts set the course for the illusionary formation of a distinctive national identity and state legitimacy, illuminating deep-rooted cultural explanations as to why socialism has survived in North Korea despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's continuing march toward economic prosperity. With over fifty striking color illustrations, Illusive Utopia captures the spectacular illusion within a country where the arts are not only a means of entertainment but also a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize the population. Suk-Young Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor with Kim Yong of Long Road Home: A Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor.
The moral inquiry into the nature of justice is often marginalized, as contemporary discussions focus primarily on political considerations. Yet, the need to examine the moral framework of justice is fundamental. What is the point of justice, after all, if not to establish a moral framework for political interactions? The question resonates especially when recognizing that no monocultures exist over time and space. In examining Plato’s thoughts on individual and social morality (dikaiosune) and Aristotle’s focus on individual virtue (arête) and the pursuit of well-being (eudaimonia), the author proffers foundational resources for today’s discussions of justice. Moreover, he brings this nexus of thought into conversation with theories that have emerged over the centuries, such as Kant’s concept of due concern and respect, individual rights and responsibilities as in Hobbes, Locke and J.S. Mill. Thus, he engages contemporary disputes of justice including distributive vs. relational schemes, choice vs. chance considerations, group rights theories, value pluralism, the right vs. the good, as well as international and future justice. His inquiry concludes with the provision of a deontological framework set against a liberal political context, justice as right actions, for further examination of questions of justice.
Understanding Religious Conversion begins with emphasis on the value of respecting religious/theological interpretations of conversion while coordinating social scientific studies of how personal, social, and cultural issues are relevant to the human transformational process. It encourages us to bring together the perspectives of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies into critical and mutually-informing conversation for establishing a richer and more accurate perception of the complex phenomenon of religious conversion. The case of St. Augustine's conversion experience superbly illustrates the complicated and multidimensional process of religious change. By critically extending the contributions of the literature within Lewis Rambo's interdisciplinary framework, Dong Young Kim presents a more integrated picture of how personal, social, cultural, and religious/theological components interact with one another in the process of Augustine's conversion. In doing so, he has struggled with how to relocate more effectively and practically the conversion narrative of Augustine within the context of pastoral care and ministry (and the field of the academy)--in order to facilitate a better understanding of the conversion stories of the church members as well as to enhance the experiences of religious conversion within the Christian community.
Since the early 1960s the Korean experience represents a fairly extreme example of 1 development strategy--the open, export led, labor intensive model. Since the onset of rapid economic growth in the early 1960s, triggered by a set of liberalizing economic policy reforms, manufactured exports have expanded at an average annual rate of over 25% and have provided much of the impetus for the growth of industry and industrial employment. Expanded domestic markets for intermediates and capital equipment have brought substantial import-substituting industrial growth and a relative abundance of domestic and international finance. Another aspect of Korea's experience which makes it a valuable case study is the fact that the country entered this period of development with an exceptionally equally distributed stock of human and physical wealth. The Korean case represents close to an extreme in 2 dimensions: rapid, open, export led, labor intensive growth combined with markedly egalitarian initial social and economic structures. For the student of demographic transition, Korea's experience is noteworthy because of the rapidity of change. The crude birthrate declined 40% between 1960-75. The mechanisms and socioeconomic determinants of this transition are questions of substantial interest to those concerned with population problems. Kwon illuminates the historical antecedents to this period of rapid demographic change. It was the drastic upheaval of Korean society during the wartime period that set the stage for fertility transition. The dislocations and destruction of the Korean War completed the process. The war greatly weakened the family structure of Korean society and put and end to early marriage. In addition to affecting family values and birth control practice in Korea, it directly interfered with family formation and fertility. Repetto explores the channels of influence through which the economic development of Korea affected the demographic transition. Kim demonstrates that the policies with the most pronounced effect of population growth and distribution have been implicit and indirect. Kim and Sloboda sheds light on the economic forces behind migration through the analysis of new data on the economic characteristics of migrants.
This is just a book that chronicles my journeys driving for Lyft and Uber over a one year period. I thought it would be so much fun to share with other some highly entertaining rides. From picking up drug dealers to move their supplies, bringing men to see their prostitutes, to witnesses big concerts and sporting events, and bringing older Jewish ladies to the hair salon, I have seen it all in a year of bringing people around Chicago. Please tag along as I give advice on how to be a better drivers, and share with you some of the funniest rides I have experienced.
Justice as Right Actions presents an original theory of justice anchored in the analytical philosophical tradition. In contrast to many contemporary approaches, the theory provides normative guidance, rather than focusing solely on political structures and institutions, as the question of justice is seen to comprise both a moral inquiry concerned with questions of good and bad, right and wrong, and a political inquiry, concerned with the nature of the polity and how individuals relate to it. Presenting a relational account of justice, rather than a distributive account – the latter, so much more prevalent in current studies – communications are seen as the key to the theory, both in the substantive sense as a discursive method of resolving disputes, as well as instrumentally, in the transmission of concepts, especially values through time. Rule-oriented in approach, justice as right actions attempts to be value-neutral, acknowledging, however, an underlying thin theory of the good, including concepts of rationality, autonomous moral agency, equal concern and respect for others, as well as plurality of values. Its political context is liberalism, with components of negative liberty and equality of concern and respect, while underscoring as well, the concepts of tolerance and social diversity. In this study, the original theory of Justice as Right Actions is also contrasted with and situated among contemporary accounts of justice, including the most important theoretical works on the topic in the past half-century. Thus, the study also serves as a valuable review and critique of such major contemporary accounts of justice.
I wrote this book to add to the incredible stories of people who have seen the other side of the veil. I wanted to share in my own words some of the eternal knowings I gained. Such as: love does not arise from life, but rather life arises out of love. Love is the breath inside each and every one of us. It makes us who we are. We were molded out of love and came to Earth to experience what it is like to be human. God created, or rather BECAME, the Universe to answer the question, "Who am I?" and to engage Himself in the ultimate theater or musical. I wanted to share what I learned when I merged with Source and understood the reasons for everything, including all of our sufferings and setbacks. I understood the nature of the polarity of existence (how you cannot understand joy without despair, patience without frustration, etc.). This world was created for our benefit, so that we can grow our love and eventually return to the Creator. I hope some will find my words peaceful and useful in their lives.
In pursuit of the question of law, Young Kim explores foundational political and moral concerns and develops a new normative theory of law. This theory of law may be stated as two principles, in lexical priority, as follows: First Principle: One should obey those laws of legal-rational political authority that do not otherwise violate societal norms and customs. Second Principle: Government should only enforce rules of human behavior of legitimate legal-rational political authority. This view understands the foundation of law to be political, including the power to enforce rules. Thus, as this book argues, the question of law is seen primarily as a question of obedience—whether and in what circumstances it is appropriate to obey the law. Furthermore, justice is seen as providing the moral framework within which rules of law are articulated. Law should serve the demands of justice; in particular, the theory of justice as right actions, which is led by moral concerns.
Ni-free Ti-based Shape Memory Alloys reviews the fundamental issues of biomedical beta-type Ti base shape memory and superelastic alloys, including martensitic transformation, shape memory and superelastic properties, alloy development, thermomechanical treatment and microstructure control, and biocompatibility. Some unique properties, such as large nonlinear elastic behavior and low Young’s modulus, observed in metastable Ti alloys are discussed on the basis of phase stability. As it is expected that superelastic Ti alloys will further expand the applications of shape memory alloys within the biomedical field, this book provides a comprehensive review of these new findings in Ti-base shape memory and superelastic alloys. Includes coverage of phase transformations in titanium alloys Discusses mechanical properties and alloy development Presents a review of Ti-based shape alloys and their applications
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