[Symposium] [2010 International Symposium] Incorporating Immigrants and Redefining Social Membership in a Multicultural Society

10 December, 2010
Uncho-Useon Education Hall
Korea University

Organizer

Korea Social Science Research Council
Korea Research Institute for Vocation Education and Training

Program

09:00-09:30 Registration
09:30-09:40 Opening Ceremony
09:40-10:00 Keynote Speech
10:00-12:30 Session1: Comparing Social Membership in Northeast Asia
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:50 Session2: Women Marriage Immigrants and their Children
16:10-18:00 Session3: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Cilvility
18:00-20:00 Reception and Annual Meeting of KOSSREC

[2010 International Symposium] Incorporating Immigrants and Redefining Social Membership in a Multicultural Society

In this symposium, scholars from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China presented research results that introduced and compared discourses on multiculturalism. In addition, a series of presentations was given on the reality and problems of multicultural education in Korea. As for presentations on international comparison, Erin Chung’s "Redefining Membership and Asian Rights in Japan and Korea", which compared membership in Korea and Japan was of particular note. Erin Chung classified multicultural phenomena in Korea and Japan according to characteristics of immigrants and types of national policies of accepting immigrants, and compared and analyzed membership that the two nations give to immigrants. Hong-Zen Wang from Taiwan delivered an interesting presentation titled "Incorporating New Immigrants and Redefining Social Membership in Taiwanese Society" that explained the multicultural phenomenon in Taiwanese society by comparing the food cultures of Taiwan, China, and Japan. In his presentation titled "Multicultural Minorities and Searching for Coexistence in Multicultural Korean Society," In-jin Yoon categorized immigrant minorities in Korea into foreign workers, marriage immigrant women, children of multicultural families, North Korean defectors, overseas Chinese, and refugees,  and investigated their reality while trying to formulate a discourse on the coexistence of all groups. The presentation was followed by presentations of research on the acceptance of multiculturalism, trends in multicultural studies, analysis of multiculturalism in Russia, contextual understanding of the school life of children of rural multicultural families, as well as a presentation that dealt with multiculturalism in Korea from the perspective of the humanities and introduced multicultural characteristics of Joseon society depicted in the ancient novel Samhanseubyu.