The Korea Program at Stanford will mark its 20-year anniversary with a conference focused on North Korean issues and South Korea’s pop culture wave (Hallyu), two aspects of Korea that continue to intrigue the public, exploring how to translate this public attention into an increased academic interest in Korea.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Featuring a keynote address by
Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations
 

DAY 1: Thursday, May 19, 9:00 a.m. - 5:15 p.m.

9:00-9:15 a.m.
Opening and Welcome Remarks

Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Asia-Pacific Research Center and Korea Program, Stanford
Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford
Gabriella Safran, Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Arts, Stanford

9:15-10:45 a.m.
Panel on North Korea

Moderated by Yumi Moon, Associate Professor of History, Stanford

Siegfried Hecker, Professor Emeritus, Management Science and Engineering; Senior Fellow Emeritus, FSI, Stanford
Kim Sook, former ROK Ambassador to UN; Executive Director, Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future
Joohee Cho, Seoul Bureau Chief, ABC News

11:00-11:50 a.m. 
Korea Program at Stanford: Past, Present, and Future 

Moderated by Kelsi Caywood, Research Associate, Korea Program, APARC, Stanford

Paul Chang, Associate Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
Joon-woo Park, former ROK Ambassador to EU and Singapore; 2011-12 Koret Fellow
Jong Chun Woo, former president of Stanford APARC-Seoul Forum; Professor Emeritus, Seoul National University
Megan Faircloth, Senior in East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford

11:50 a.m.-12:30 p.m.        Lunch Break

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Introduction by H.R. McMaster, former National Security Advisor; Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford

Moderated by Gi-Wook Shin, Director of APARC and Korea Program, Stanford
 

2:00-3:30 p.m.
Panel on the Korean Wave

Moderated by Dafna Zur, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director of Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford

SUHO, Leader of EXO
Angela Killoren, CEO of CJ ENM America, Inc.
Marci Kwon, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, Stanford

3:45-5:15 p.m.
Documentaries on K-pop and North Korean Human Rights (teaser)*

Moderated by Haley Gordon, Research Associate, Korea Program, APARC, Stanford

Introduction of the films by Director Hark Joon Lee and Director of Photography Byeon Jaegil 

Vivian Zhu, Junior in International Relations and East Asian Studies, Stanford
Youlim Kim, Third-year PhD student in Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford
*The documentaries will not be shown on the livestream

Day 2: Friday, May 20, 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

9:00-10:30 a.m.
How to Translate Interest in North Korea and K-pop into Korean Studies

Moderated by Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Asia-Pacific Research Center and Korea Program

David Kang, Professor of International Relations and Business, USC
Yumi Moon, Associate Professor of History, Stanford
Michelle Cho, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
Dafna Zur, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director of Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford

10:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Future Visions of K-pop

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Introduction by Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Asia-Pacific Research Center and Korea Program

Conversation with:
Dafna Zur, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director of Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford
SUHO, Leader of EXO

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Gender politics were a front and center issue in South Korea's March 9th presidential election. What does the outsized role that anti-feminism played in electoral politics and public discourse convey about the politics of gender in Korea today? This panel will examine contemporary public perception and institutional tolerance of gender equality in South Korea and provide a historical overview of women's numerical and substantive political representation since women's suffrage in 1948. The panelists will also draw on their experiences conducting multi-country studies to provide comparative regional insight.

Speakers:

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Young-Im Lee is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches gender politics and East Asian politics. Her research primarily focuses on gender and elections in South Korea and Taiwan. Dr. Lee is a chief researcher at the Institute of Political Studies at Sogang University in Seoul and was a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Her research has been supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan, and the American Political Science Association. Dr. Lee is currently working on a book project analyzing the election and impeachment of South Korea's first female president Park Geun-hye. Her research appeared in Electoral Studies, Politics & Gender, Feminist Media Studies, and Washington Post, among other outlets.

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Min Hee Go is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ewha Woman's University in Korea. Prior to joining Ewha, Dr. Go earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2012 and taught as assistant professor at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. Her research interests broadly concern key issues in diversity and sustainability, including gender and racial inequalities and sustainable development. Her first book, Rethinking Community Resilience: The Politics of Disaster Recovery in New Orleans (2021, NYU Press), investigates how civic capacity may compromise, rather than facilitate, the process of building resilience after crisis. She is currently working on her second book project which examines gender equality in East Asia. Focusing on three democratic countries—Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan— she investigates why Asian countries show different levels of public perception and institutional tolerance on gender equality. 

Moderator: Kelsi Caywood, Research Associate in Korea Program at APARC, Stanford University

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

South Korean popular culture has spread to all corners of the globe, including South Korea’s closed-off neighbor to the north. While North Korea’s Kim Jong Un regime has sought to eradicate the presence of K-pop and South Korean television dramas in his country — even threatening execution for those who consume these cultural products — their popularity endures in North Korea. This panel will address questions relating to the spread of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) in North Korea. How widespread is consumption of South Korean popular culture in the North? Are these cultural products contributing to social change in North Korea, and if so, to what extent? Does the Korean Wave have the potential to contribute to political unrest and change in North Korea?

Speakers:

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Sunny Yoon is a professor of Media and Communication at Hanyang University in Seoul. Her research encompasses the globalization of Korean media, the interaction of religion and new media, cultural politics, youth culture, and fandom of Korean popular culture. She is the author of Communication Technology and Creative Industries and Global Media and Asian Identity: Cultural Hybridity or Cultural Resistance, and she has authored papers and a book chapter on the impact of mobile media and South Korean media on North Korean youth culture and social change. She has served as Section Head for Visual Culture in the International Association for Media and Communication Research, as well as the editor-in-chief of the journal of Asian Communication Research. She has been a visiting fellow at Yale University and University of Cambridge, as well as a visiting professor at Doshisha University in Japan, National Taiwan University, and King's College London. Professor of Media and Communication, Hanyang University, Korea

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Suk-Young Kim is a professor of Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA where she also directs Center for Performance Studies. She is the author of Illusive Utopia :Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (Michigan, 2010), DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (Columbia, 2014), and most recently, K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (Stanford, 2018). Her scholarship has been recognized by the James Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, the Association for Theater in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award, and ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship. Currently She is working on a book titled Way Ahead of Squid Game (forthcoming in 2023), Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance (Stanford UP, under contract) and is editing Cambridge Companion to K-Pop. Her comments on Korean cultural politics have been featured in major media outlets, such as Billboard, CNN, NPR, and the New York Times.

Moderator: Haley Gordon, Research Associate in Korea Program at APARC, Stanford University

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's spring 2022 webinar series, Negotiating Women's Rights and Gender Equality in Asia.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Since 2013, women's higher education enrollment rate has outpaced men's enrollment rate in South Korea. Despite this increase in educational attainment, gender inequalities remain deeply rooted in Korean higher education, including gender gaps in STEM, doctoral program enrollment, and faculty diversity. Universities have also fallen short in including gender-related topics in curricular content and ensuring safe campuses for women. The panel will reflect on these educational disparities and the social, cultural, and economic forces shaping Korean women's lives during and after higher education. It will also place Korea's experience in a comparative context by discussing global trends in gender and higher education.

Speakers:

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Namhee Kim has a 20-year research and teaching career in higher education in South Korea and the U.S. She is currently an Associate Professor of Education at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. She has previously worked for Korean Education Development Institute and Korean Women’s Development Institute in the areas of education policy development and conducting research on women workforce issues. Her earlier teaching career includes many graduate classes at Texas A & M and Northcentral University in the US. Kim holds a PhD in Education majoring in Adult Education and Human Resource Development from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and MEd and BA from Ewha Womans University. Her research interests include women’s career development, critical human resource development, and international education.  

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Christine Min Wotipka is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Her research centers around two main themes examined from cross-national and longitudinal approaches. One line of work seeks to understand how marginalized groups and topics have been incorporated into school textbooks. Another contributes to the comparative scholarship in gender, diversity, leadership, and higher education. Her articles have appeared in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Gender & Society, American Journal of Education, AERA Open, Journal of LGBT Youth, Comparative Education Review, Compare, Comparative Education, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Wotipka earned her BA in International Relations and French at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and MA in Sociology and PhD in International Comparative Education at Stanford University. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she proudly served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in rural northeast Thailand and worked in South Korea at an economic research firm. Among her professional activities, Dr. Wotipka has consulted on girls education policies for the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan.

Moderator: Dafna Zur, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures; director of Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University