Doctoral Dissertation & Master's Thesis by Sherri L Ter Molen
In the mid-1990s, the South Korean government and culture industries embarked on a campaign to pr... more In the mid-1990s, the South Korean government and culture industries embarked on a campaign to promote Korean pop culture, tangible goods, and tourism along with the country’s national identity abroad as a unified brand. Today, Hallyu, meaning the Korean Wave, is a phenomenon with an estimated 80 million fans spread out across the globe including a growing and fervent fan community in the United States. The purpose of this complete member ethnography (CME) informed by the hermeneutic phenomenology of communication (HPC) is to explore the identities of non-Korean members of Korean Meetup Groups formed through the social networking site, Meetup.com. The findings suggest that Korean culture appeals to this group of Koreanophiles, fans of Korean culture, because it combines Eastern and Western elements, because Korean history is sometimes relatable, and because particular morals and values resonate. For this group, consuming and participating in Korean culture fulfills needs unmet by U.S. culture, and Korean culture both reflects and (re)constructs the ways in which they view and present themselves.
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Because there has been a nursing shortage for the past decade and because the competition between... more Because there has been a nursing shortage for the past decade and because the competition between employers for experienced registered nurses is fierce, I utilized archival quantitative data from a syndicated advertising database known as The Media Audit, quantitative data I collected from 100 surveys, qualitative data that I collected from 15 interviews, and qualitative data that I collected during 20 hours of observations in hospital cafeterias and nearby restaurants to discover how RNs use media, whether or not they share these media as an occupational co-culture, & their attitudes toward recruitment advertising in these media. This study draws upon Smit & Neijen's (2000) concept of the affinity for advertising that refers to people’s receptivity, attitudes, and emotions toward advertising in various media vehicles as well as Allen, Mahto, & Otondo's (2007) application of signaling theory from psychology to the realm of employer branding. The results indicate that registered nurses share trade media as an occupational co-culture but that their media consumption of general market mass media (e.g. Internet, television, etc.) tends to correlate with their age demographics, races, and socioeconomic statuses. The results testify to the fact that registered nurses in the Chicago DMA make inferences about jobs and organizations based on the media vehicles used for recruitment advertising campaigns and that registered nurses are more receptive to recruitment advertising in respected trade publications than in general market mass media.
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Publications by Sherri L Ter Molen
Transcultural Fandom and the Globalization of Hallyu, 2019
Korean pop culture, otherwise known as Hallyu or the Korean Wave, has garnered a notable followin... more Korean pop culture, otherwise known as Hallyu or the Korean Wave, has garnered a notable following of non-Korean fans across the United States including the American Midwest. The purpose of this complete member ethnography (CME) informed by the hermeneutic phenomenology of communication (HPC) is to explore the identities of non-Korean members of Korean Meetup Groups formed through the social networking site, Meetup.com. In these groups, ethnic Koreans and members without Korean ancestry meet together in the offline world to share various aspects of Korea’s pop and traditional cultures. The non-Koreans in this study recount how they first came into contact with Korean culture, why it captured their attention, and how they continue to use Hallyu to learn about all things Korean. The findings of this study suggest that Korean pop culture appeals to this particular group of non-Koreans because Korean history is sometimes relatable and because the morals and values that are present in Hallyu tend to resonate on deep ethnic and personal levels. Further, it seems that consuming and participating in Korean culture fulfills needs unmet by U.S. culture, and in turn, it both reflects and reconstructs the ways in which these non-Koreans view and present themselves.
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Pacific Affairs, 2019
Preview...
The small country of South Korea is a media and technology giant. Korean films have r... more Preview...
The small country of South Korea is a media and technology giant. Korean films have received accolades at prestigious international film festivals, Korean pop music (K-pop) groups have sold out concerts abroad, and Korean consumer goods are at the forefront of technological innovation. The emergence of Korean soft power is remarkable since, as Dal Yong Jin and Nojin Kwak point out in the introduction to their enterprising edited volume, Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea, the country was late to the media and technology game when compared to other developing nations in the mid-twentieth century. English-language Korean communication, media, and culture scholarship has advanced in tandem, and so to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Korean American Communication Association (KACA) in 2018, Jin and Kwak introduce this guide with the goal of fostering a historically based understanding of the contemporary changes in the Korean communication industries in relation to the global cultural markets.
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The Global Impact of South Korean Popular Culture: Hallyu Unbound, Sep 2014
The tourism industry has become increasingly competitive over the last several decades, and South... more The tourism industry has become increasingly competitive over the last several decades, and South Korea relies on Korean popular culture, or Hallyu, to entice foreign visitors to choose Korea over other destinations. In this analysis of the visual rhetoric of tourism advertising and marketing, I examine the commodification of Korean history and culture in three materials circulated by the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) or the Seoul Metropolitan Government (a 30-second commercial, a five-minute music video, and a 30-minute drama) to discover how Hallyu imagery works in these campaigns and how U.S.-based audiences might interpret these images now that they have unprecedented access to Korean pop (K-pop) music videos, dramas, and movies through the Internet (“DramaFever Brings,” 2010; Stober, 2011). Hallyu has succeeded in attracting tourists from Asia , but is Hallyu a strong enough force to cut through East-West cultural barriers and to motivate Americans to travel to Korea?
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The Korean Wave: Korean Popular Culture in Global Context, Feb 2014
South Korean pop culture, or Hallyu, is a growing phenomenon in the United States. Therefore rely... more South Korean pop culture, or Hallyu, is a growing phenomenon in the United States. Therefore relying on Appadurai’s (1996) framework of global cultural flows to understand how the movement of people, technology, capital, media, and ideology move across national borders and Jin’s (2010) definition of cultural hybridity theory, which posits that globalized U.S. media is absorbed by local cultures and reflected in their media (p. 57), I critically examine the relationships between U.S. cultural imperialism, the development and spread of Hallyu, and American consumption of these media. I argue that Hallyu’s hybridity makes these foreign products easy for Americans to digest since they recognize their own pop culture within them, and I conclude that though it may be hard for some to imagine that foreign media might be able to crack through the American cultural barricade, there is potential for Hallyu to make a substantial impact in the United States.
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Korea: Politics, Economy and Society (The Korea Yearbook 2013), Sep 2013
In 2006, Diane Sawyer became the first American journalist to broadcast live from inside North Ko... more In 2006, Diane Sawyer became the first American journalist to broadcast live from inside North Korea. Her trip ended with an hour-long special programme scrutinising life in what she considers possibly ‘the most dangerous flashpoint on Earth’ (Sawyer 2006). The threat Sawyer actually presents, however, is not that of a nuclear-armed country but of a country whose regime, despite the will of the people, refuses to be a major market for US consumer goods. Applying Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of media operations, I conduct a discourse analysis of the textual and visual symbols Sawyer uses in illustrating and evaluating the country’s quality of life in ABC Primetime ‘North Korea: Inside the Shadows’. I conclude that Sawyer is unable to overcome her ethnocentric worldview, and therefore, North Korea is unable to emerge from the shadows.
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Media Asia, Jun 2011
""Using Entman’s (2007) concept of framing bias in the media, I conducted a rhetorical analysis o... more ""Using Entman’s (2007) concept of framing bias in the media, I conducted a rhetorical analysis of the coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign in the online edition of the English language newspaper, The Korea Times. Nationalistic views were (re)constructed regarding three salient issues: the Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS-FTA), the economy, and North Korea/nuclear weapons/Kim Jung Il, and framing bias in support of Democratic Candidate Barack Obama was evident.
This paper is available through the EBSCOhost Communication & Mass Media Database.""
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Books by Sherri L Ter Molen
This volume fills a gap in the existing literature and proposes an interdisciplinary and multicul... more This volume fills a gap in the existing literature and proposes an interdisciplinary and multicultural comparative approach to the impact of Hallyu worldwide. The contributors analyze the spread of South Korean popular products from different perspectives (popular culture, sociology, anthropology, linguistics) and from different geographical locations (Asia, Europe, North America, and South America). The contributors come from a variety of countries (UK, Japan, Argentina, Poland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Indonesia, USA, Romania). The volume is divided into three sections and twelve chapters that each bring a new perspective on the main topic. This emphasizes the impact of Hallyu and draws real and imaginary “maps” of the export of South Korean cultural products. Starting from the theoretical backgrounds offered by the existing literature, each chapter presents the impact of Hallyu in a particular country. This applied character does not exclude transnational comparisons or critical interrogations about the future development of the phenomenon.
All authors are speaking about their own, native cultures. This inside perspective adds an important value to the understanding of the impact of a different culture on the “national” culture of each respective country. The contributions to this volume illustrate the “globalization” of the cultural products of Hallyu and show the various faces of Hallyu around the world.
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Conference Presentations (with Papers) by Sherri L Ter Molen
Although few non-English language songs have broken into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 musi... more Although few non-English language songs have broken into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 music chart over the years and though many Americans have never watched a foreign film, Hallyu has garnered a notable following of non-Korean fans across the United States including within Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Detroit. The purpose of this complete member ethnography (CME) informed by the hermeneutic phenomenology of communication (HPC) is to explore the identities of non-Korean members of Korean Meetup Groups formed through the social networking site, Meetup.com. In these groups, which are formed virtually with the intention that members will meet face-to-face, ethnic Koreans and non-Koreans come together to share various aspects of Korea’s pop and traditional cultures. The narratives of the non-Koreans in this study recount how they first came into contact with Korean culture, how Hallyu’s hybridity captured their attention, and how they continue to use Hallyu to learn about Korean culture. The findings of this study suggest that Korean pop culture appeals to this particular group of non-Koreans because Korean history and spirituality is sometimes relatable and because the morals and values that are present in Hallyu tend to resonate on deep ethnic and personal levels. For the non-Koreans in this study, consuming and participating in Korean culture fulfills needs unmet by U.S. culture, and in turn, it both reflects and (re)constructs the ways in which these non-Koreans view and present themselves.
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Meetup.com is a social networking site that boasts nearly 14,000 local interest-based groups worl... more Meetup.com is a social networking site that boasts nearly 14,000 local interest-based groups worldwide including more than 50 Korean language and culture Meetup groups in the United States. This ethnographic study records the lived experiences of non-Korean members of these groups to explore why Korean culture resonates with them to the extent that they appropriate Korean cultural symbols and seek out other Koreanophiles with whom they create new meanings. Most importantly, this study seeks to understand how their participation in Korean cultural activities shapes their own identities.
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Much of the scholarly writing on the transnational popularity of K-pop and other South Korean cul... more Much of the scholarly writing on the transnational popularity of K-pop and other South Korean cultural products has concentrated on the economic structures and governmental policies that enabled the Korean Wave, or Hallyu, to surge, often relying on critical/cultural approaches without offering consumers the opportunities to share their own lived experiences. This is particularly true in the U.S. context where few Hallyu studies have been conducted despite growing evidence indicating a segment of the non-Korean American population is not just consuming K-pop in the privacy of their own homes but are active participants in the larger sphere of Korean culture overall, wearing K-pop styles, traveling to Seoul, and studying the Korean language. The purpose of this paper, rooted in ethnography and the hermeneutic phenomenology of communication, is to cultivate a deeper understanding of everyday life through the description and interpretation of the essence, or nature, of the U.S. K-pop phenomenon by presenting the personal narratives of non-Korean members of Korean affinity groups formed through Meetup.com, highlighting the ways in which they appropriate Korean cultural symbols and create meaning as they share these symbols with others. By virtue of these narratives, we may garner greater understandings of how non-Korean U.S. Hallyu fans situate themselves in the world.
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In an April 2012 CNN Travel article, a University of Washington student was quoted as saying that... more In an April 2012 CNN Travel article, a University of Washington student was quoted as saying that he wanted to visit South Korea after discovering Korean culture through the country’s pop music, a genre known as K-pop. He is not alone. Hallyu, a term encompassing both Korean pop and traditional cultures, has made significant strides into the United States. In fact, even before Psy’s hit “Gangnam Style” reached the number two spot on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart in 2012, Hallyu had already amassed a niche following that had been large enough to support the first U.S.-originating Hallyu tour all the way back in 2006. In this presentation, I rely on the work of scholars such as Urry as well as Bulmer and Buchanan-Oliver to discuss the visual rhetoric of Hallyu symbols embedded in advertising and marketing materials distributed by the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) and the Seoul Metropolitan Government. I evaluate how mediated and commodified Korean cultural products communicate symbols specific to Korea to which U.S. Hallyu fans attach personal meanings that they derive through their own enjoyment of K-pop music videos, television dramas, films, and other exports. I go on to explain that, when U.S. Hallyu fans encounter these same symbols in Korean tourism advertising and marketing materials, they find them familiar rather then foreign, increasing the likelihood that the campaigns will be successful in evoking desires of paradise acquisition and potentially aiding the Korean government in reaching its goal to increase the country’s inbound tourist revenue threefold to $30 billion by 2020.
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On the lost continent of Dinotopia, dinosaurs and humans live together in an idealistic communal ... more On the lost continent of Dinotopia, dinosaurs and humans live together in an idealistic communal society where attempting to leave the island is as perilous as crossing the Tumen River to escape the communist utopia of North Korea. There are also other parallels between the purely imagined world of Dinotopia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a nation that exists in a liminal space between the imagined and the real. I examine American James Gurney’s “Dinotopia” children’s book series to unravel the meanings of symbols embedded in these cultural artifacts and to make visible the concurrent themes of self-reliance, internal cooperation, and societal isolation that exist between the narratives of the Codes of Dinotopia and North Korean Juche ideology. I find that these dreams of paradise allow us to imagine a more idyllic U.S.-North Korea relationship because they reflect the bonds of humanity that span cultural and political chasms.
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In this essay, I trace the history of the framing of the two Korean states to reveal how the poli... more In this essay, I trace the history of the framing of the two Korean states to reveal how the political divisions that come to a head at the 38th parallel are reflected in the U.S. media. Specifically, I question how the U.S. media have constructed the narratives of these two states, how the narratives continue to evolve, and how they shape U.S. public opinion. Through this analysis, I argue that Americans may only be more aware of the Koreas today than they were in the 1950s because of events such as the promotion of North Korea from near-obscurity to the “Axis of Evil” and South Korea’s explosion onto the global pop scene with Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” both of which have helped Americans locate the Korean peninsula, if not on the map, at least in the discourse of U.S. hegemonic power.
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In May 2013, Psy took home the trophy for the Top Streaming Song (Video) for “Gangnam Style,” bec... more In May 2013, Psy took home the trophy for the Top Streaming Song (Video) for “Gangnam Style,” becoming the first South Korean to win a U.S. Billboard Music Award. South Korean pop music (K-pop) is part of the Korean Wave or Hallyu, a term coined in China in the 1990s to describe the ever-growing popularity of South Korean pop culture across Asia, but Hallyu is now a worldwide phenomenon. To date however, North Korea’s version of pop culture, which includes YouTube videos such as “North Korea Army Music - Death to US-Imperialism - 미제가 덤벼들면 죽음을 주리,” has not generated the momentum to be encapsulated by a singular term such as Hallyu. And perhaps not surprisingly, NK-pop has not attracted flocks of U.S. fans, and its artists have not yet claimed a Billboard Music Award.
The future may hold something else in store, however. In July 2012, Moranbong Band, an all-female group whose members wore uncharacteristically short, glittering mini-dresses and played instruments such as electric guitars, debuted at a concert for Kim Jung-un, but Moranbong failed to seize the attention of the U.S. press. Instead, it was fixated with the DPRK’s copyright infringements for the unauthorized use of Disney-owned costumed characters, music, and film clips. In this Pecha-Kucha presentation, I rely on cultural hybridity theory, which posits that local cultures fuse elements of foreign cultures with their own, to reflect on Moranbong’s appearance and musical style as well as to contemplate why the U.S. press passed over the group with little regard so quickly. Moranbong may be the be the most hybridized band in DPRK history, but could this NK-pop group ever capture America’s attention and a U.S. Billboard Music Award?
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On December 14, 2011, a bronze statue of a teenage girl sitting in a chair with her hands in her ... more On December 14, 2011, a bronze statue of a teenage girl sitting in a chair with her hands in her lap next to and empty chair was placed along a narrow street in Seoul, South Korea. The girl had a solemn face, and she wore traditional Korean clothing known as hanbok without any shoes. Resolute, she stared straight ahead at those she held responsible for her decades of unimaginable misery and humiliation: the Japanese Embassy, the representative government of Japan in South Korea (Choe, 2011).
In this narrative criticism, I analyze the text-based articles that ran in The Korea Times, The Japan Times, and The New York Times on December 15, 2011, the day after the comfort women statue was erected across from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. The statue commemorates the Korean women who were drafted into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II (Choe, 2011; Kang, 2011; Statue of ‘comfort women’ erected, 2011), and the purpose of this analysis is to explain how the narratives in the three different newspapers perpetuate particular interpretations (Foss, 2004, p. 339). I conclude that though the monument cannot speak with words, the young girl’s uncomfortable gaze will haunt the Japanese Embassy until they fulfill their duty to restore the honor of the women their government so heinously exploited.
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On September 29, 1999, the Associated Press broke the story of the alleged U.S. military massacre... more On September 29, 1999, the Associated Press broke the story of the alleged U.S. military massacre of as many as 400 unarmed Korean refugees who had taken cover under a bridge near the village of No Gun Ri in south central Korea almost 60 years earlier at the beginning of the Korean War (Choe, Hanley, & Mendoza, 1999, p. A.01; Hanley, Choe, & Mendoza, 2001). Some subsequent reports attempted to discredit this story (e.g., Bateman, 2002; Galloway, 2000), and American audiences, unable to reconcile the conflicting accounts, relegated the entire matter to the dark corners of U.S. public memory (Choi, 2008).
In this ideological criticism (Foss, 2004), I examine the power structures that once concealed, and have since shielded, the No Gun Ri Massacre from the American public, effectively blocking every effort made by the survivors and their supporters to receive an official apology and restitution from the U.S. government for this grotesque destruction of human life. Furthermore, I extend the concept of bio-power, meaning the authoritative power over all aspects of life as well as death (Foucault, 1990, pp. 142-43), to include the notion of social death, a body that has been isolated and (permanently) stripped of its identity (Patterson, 1982, p. 38). But in the case of the No Gun Ri Massacre, I argue that the victims and survivors continue to suffer a series of social deaths posthumously as their stories are routinely resurrected in the media only to be terminated once again without achieving the closure they seek.
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Asian women outside of Korea have lauded the Confucian values portrayed in Korean popular culture... more Asian women outside of Korea have lauded the Confucian values portrayed in Korean popular culture known as Hallyu (Hirata, 2008; Lin & Tong, 2008; & Shim, 2008). However despite the fact that Hallyu has spread to non-Confucian countries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas (Li, 2005 as cited by Shim, 2008, p. 27), scholars have not examined how non-Asian fans might interpret the visual or textual rhetoric used to illustrate Confucian values in Korean media. Because “Korea has long waged a struggle for cultural continuity, confronted by a series of threats of foreign cultural domination,” (Shim, 2008, p. 30), I, a Caucasian American Hallyu fan, conducted a narrative criticism of three popular Korean films that depict the theme (Foss, 2004, p. 338) of tension between Confucian family values and modern consumer-driven lifestyles. The films I examined are: 200 Pounds Beauty (미녀는 괴로워, 2006), A Moment to Remember (내 머리 속의 지우개, 2004), and Seducing Mr. Perfect (미스터 로빈 꼬시기, 2006). In each of these films, the female lead characters are faced with the choice of whether to remain true to herself and loyal to her family or to pursue superficial modern possessions, but each eventually comes to the realization that familial relationships are more important than personal material gain. In this way, these films, though popular and not political in nature, demonstrate a subtle resistance to capitalism by reinforcing Confucian virtues. As Chang (2010) notes, “The family-centered nature of Korean life is apparent not only in personal life but also in the social order, politics, and economy” (p. 4), and I extend this line of thought to include the notion that Korean familial relationships, rooted in Confucianism, are also reflected and reinforced in popular media, fortifying the claims of Hallyu viewers who insist that Korean media provides an alternative text to the “rapidly changing Asian society” (Lin & Tong, 2008, p. 124).
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Eat Your Kimchi, an interactive Korean culture vlog (video blog), features Canadians, Simon and M... more Eat Your Kimchi, an interactive Korean culture vlog (video blog), features Canadians, Simon and Martina Stawski, in humorous video segments that both celebrate and critique Korean pop (K-pop) music. In this textual analysis, I consider the disjunctures in the global cultural economy (Appadurai, 1990) that enable more than 214,000 transnational followers to form this geographically dispersed community of interest.
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Doctoral Dissertation & Master's Thesis by Sherri L Ter Molen
Publications by Sherri L Ter Molen
The small country of South Korea is a media and technology giant. Korean films have received accolades at prestigious international film festivals, Korean pop music (K-pop) groups have sold out concerts abroad, and Korean consumer goods are at the forefront of technological innovation. The emergence of Korean soft power is remarkable since, as Dal Yong Jin and Nojin Kwak point out in the introduction to their enterprising edited volume, Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea, the country was late to the media and technology game when compared to other developing nations in the mid-twentieth century. English-language Korean communication, media, and culture scholarship has advanced in tandem, and so to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Korean American Communication Association (KACA) in 2018, Jin and Kwak introduce this guide with the goal of fostering a historically based understanding of the contemporary changes in the Korean communication industries in relation to the global cultural markets.
This paper is available through the EBSCOhost Communication & Mass Media Database.""
Books by Sherri L Ter Molen
All authors are speaking about their own, native cultures. This inside perspective adds an important value to the understanding of the impact of a different culture on the “national” culture of each respective country. The contributions to this volume illustrate the “globalization” of the cultural products of Hallyu and show the various faces of Hallyu around the world.
Conference Presentations (with Papers) by Sherri L Ter Molen
The future may hold something else in store, however. In July 2012, Moranbong Band, an all-female group whose members wore uncharacteristically short, glittering mini-dresses and played instruments such as electric guitars, debuted at a concert for Kim Jung-un, but Moranbong failed to seize the attention of the U.S. press. Instead, it was fixated with the DPRK’s copyright infringements for the unauthorized use of Disney-owned costumed characters, music, and film clips. In this Pecha-Kucha presentation, I rely on cultural hybridity theory, which posits that local cultures fuse elements of foreign cultures with their own, to reflect on Moranbong’s appearance and musical style as well as to contemplate why the U.S. press passed over the group with little regard so quickly. Moranbong may be the be the most hybridized band in DPRK history, but could this NK-pop group ever capture America’s attention and a U.S. Billboard Music Award?
In this narrative criticism, I analyze the text-based articles that ran in The Korea Times, The Japan Times, and The New York Times on December 15, 2011, the day after the comfort women statue was erected across from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. The statue commemorates the Korean women who were drafted into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II (Choe, 2011; Kang, 2011; Statue of ‘comfort women’ erected, 2011), and the purpose of this analysis is to explain how the narratives in the three different newspapers perpetuate particular interpretations (Foss, 2004, p. 339). I conclude that though the monument cannot speak with words, the young girl’s uncomfortable gaze will haunt the Japanese Embassy until they fulfill their duty to restore the honor of the women their government so heinously exploited.
In this ideological criticism (Foss, 2004), I examine the power structures that once concealed, and have since shielded, the No Gun Ri Massacre from the American public, effectively blocking every effort made by the survivors and their supporters to receive an official apology and restitution from the U.S. government for this grotesque destruction of human life. Furthermore, I extend the concept of bio-power, meaning the authoritative power over all aspects of life as well as death (Foucault, 1990, pp. 142-43), to include the notion of social death, a body that has been isolated and (permanently) stripped of its identity (Patterson, 1982, p. 38). But in the case of the No Gun Ri Massacre, I argue that the victims and survivors continue to suffer a series of social deaths posthumously as their stories are routinely resurrected in the media only to be terminated once again without achieving the closure they seek.
The small country of South Korea is a media and technology giant. Korean films have received accolades at prestigious international film festivals, Korean pop music (K-pop) groups have sold out concerts abroad, and Korean consumer goods are at the forefront of technological innovation. The emergence of Korean soft power is remarkable since, as Dal Yong Jin and Nojin Kwak point out in the introduction to their enterprising edited volume, Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea, the country was late to the media and technology game when compared to other developing nations in the mid-twentieth century. English-language Korean communication, media, and culture scholarship has advanced in tandem, and so to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Korean American Communication Association (KACA) in 2018, Jin and Kwak introduce this guide with the goal of fostering a historically based understanding of the contemporary changes in the Korean communication industries in relation to the global cultural markets.
This paper is available through the EBSCOhost Communication & Mass Media Database.""
All authors are speaking about their own, native cultures. This inside perspective adds an important value to the understanding of the impact of a different culture on the “national” culture of each respective country. The contributions to this volume illustrate the “globalization” of the cultural products of Hallyu and show the various faces of Hallyu around the world.
The future may hold something else in store, however. In July 2012, Moranbong Band, an all-female group whose members wore uncharacteristically short, glittering mini-dresses and played instruments such as electric guitars, debuted at a concert for Kim Jung-un, but Moranbong failed to seize the attention of the U.S. press. Instead, it was fixated with the DPRK’s copyright infringements for the unauthorized use of Disney-owned costumed characters, music, and film clips. In this Pecha-Kucha presentation, I rely on cultural hybridity theory, which posits that local cultures fuse elements of foreign cultures with their own, to reflect on Moranbong’s appearance and musical style as well as to contemplate why the U.S. press passed over the group with little regard so quickly. Moranbong may be the be the most hybridized band in DPRK history, but could this NK-pop group ever capture America’s attention and a U.S. Billboard Music Award?
In this narrative criticism, I analyze the text-based articles that ran in The Korea Times, The Japan Times, and The New York Times on December 15, 2011, the day after the comfort women statue was erected across from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. The statue commemorates the Korean women who were drafted into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II (Choe, 2011; Kang, 2011; Statue of ‘comfort women’ erected, 2011), and the purpose of this analysis is to explain how the narratives in the three different newspapers perpetuate particular interpretations (Foss, 2004, p. 339). I conclude that though the monument cannot speak with words, the young girl’s uncomfortable gaze will haunt the Japanese Embassy until they fulfill their duty to restore the honor of the women their government so heinously exploited.
In this ideological criticism (Foss, 2004), I examine the power structures that once concealed, and have since shielded, the No Gun Ri Massacre from the American public, effectively blocking every effort made by the survivors and their supporters to receive an official apology and restitution from the U.S. government for this grotesque destruction of human life. Furthermore, I extend the concept of bio-power, meaning the authoritative power over all aspects of life as well as death (Foucault, 1990, pp. 142-43), to include the notion of social death, a body that has been isolated and (permanently) stripped of its identity (Patterson, 1982, p. 38). But in the case of the No Gun Ri Massacre, I argue that the victims and survivors continue to suffer a series of social deaths posthumously as their stories are routinely resurrected in the media only to be terminated once again without achieving the closure they seek.
Applying Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) Propaganda Model (PM), I conducted a media criticism of the textual and visual rhetoric Sawyer uses in illustrating and evaluating the quality (or lack of quality) of life in “North Korea: Inside the Shadows.” Specifically, I examined Sawyer’s reliance on the capitalistic value of consumption to understand “how ideological and communicative power connect with economic, political and social power” (Klaehn, 2009, p. 43). Sawyer, an employee of The Walt Disney Company which is one of America’s largest media conglomerates, misses an opportunity to provide an alternative to the “axis of evil” news frames that have painted North Korea as a military threat, a human rights violator, and a nation at odds with the U.S. since George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address in 2002 (See Lim & Seo, 2009). At one point for example, Sawyer leads a high school class in a chorus of “Do-Re-Mi” from the American film, The Sound of Music, as if this is evidence that North Koreans crave the (market) freedoms that they are denied. I challenged Sawyer’s ethnocentric reinforcement of these negative news frames and question the power structures that prevent her from separating the people and their culture from the hostile political relationship between North Korea and the U.S.
Co-panelists: Daria LaFave, Anne Marie Fowler, and Margaret Miller-Butcher
Therefore in the discussion panel, Celebrating CALM-"unity": Living as Multicultural Korean American Communication Scholars in the U.S., we have assembled an eclectic group of junior scholars to discuss the challenges and opportunities of doing Korean American communication research. Our panel strikes closely to the theme proposed by KACA, directly examining the question of how we live our lives as Korean American scholar-teachers, and is centrally focused on the convention theme of COMM-unity since the examination of the challenges and opportunities of our work is linked dialogically to the purpose of creating more inclusive intellectual communities. Each panelist brings her or his unique perspectives and experiences to this dialog, sharing our passion for Korean American communication research and contemplating the importance of this research in the academy overall. "
The mere mention of K-pop evokes images of screaming 20-year-old fangirls, but while these young female fans of South Korean (henceforth: Korean) pop music are arguably the most visible, fans of the Korean Wave, or Hallyu1) do not always conform to this stereotype. Case in point, Jeff is a 42-year-old white man who lives in the Southern United States. He was introduced to Korean culture through the Korean television drama, Princess Hours (궁), which Netflix, a US entertainment streaming service, suggested after he watched other international programming. He was so enthralled by this K-drama that he canceled his cable television subscription because he was no longer interested in non-Korean content, and he branched out into other Korean cultural products such as K-pop, traveling all over the United States and Korea to attend concerts featuring his favorite idols. What is perhaps a bit more surprising, however, is that Jeff’s new entertainment diet led him to replace the forks in his home with chopsticks, prepare colorful and often plant-based Korean meals, and over the course of a decade, lose 80-to-90 pounds (36-to-41 kilograms) as a result.
In his 2012 book, The Impossible State, Dr. Victor Cha admits that he still “marvels” at how North Korea has managed to survive though the country makes poor economic decisions, diverts much of its wealth to the Kim family, and engages in “the most threatening behavior in East Asia.” Cha is also keenly aware that the stability of the DPRK is due, in no small part, to China’s, seemingly steadfast but not entirely unwavering, support. The question is: Why does China continue to align itself with North Korea? and Cha’s answers to this question formed the lion’s share of his February 24th presentation, “North Korea’s Future – And What It Means for China and America,” a lecture within The Paulson Institute China Series at the University of Chicago.
#Shigak | #시각 no. 2 topics include: defectors resettling in the South, foreign workers who find themselves mistreated at a museum headed by a close ally of President Park Geun-hye, a former Japanese leader speaks publicly on the comfort women issue, and the name of Ahn Cheol-soo's new political party.
I wasn't an author on this report. I simply appeared within it.