Featured Publications

Critically Capitalist

Author: Bohyeong Kim
Publication Date: 2025

Critically Capitalist presents an ethnography of South Korea’s asset seekers, including amateur stock investors, real estate enthusiasts, and money coaches, to demonstrate how financialized asset capitalism is sustained. As they hunt for profit margins, rent, and dividends, they simultaneously critique capitalism and posit their pursuit of assets as a form of resistance. Bohyeong Kim theorizes this new spirit of capitalism in South Korea as “critical capitalism,” arguing that it reflects the popular discontent with both national development and financial neoliberalism. As a paradoxical critique and legitimation, Bohyeong Kim argues that critical capitalism valorizes the capitalist economy not through a triumphant narrative, but by highlighting the emotional wounds, destroyed communities, and oppressive tactics of modern capitalism.

The Postdevelopmental State

Author: Jamie Doucette
Publication Date: 2024

Over the last 25 years, South Korea has witnessed growing inequality due to the proliferation of non-standard employment, ballooning household debt, deepening export-dependency, and the growth of super-conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai. Combined with declining rates of economic growth and turbulent political events, these processes mark a departure from Korea’s past recognition as a high growth “developmental state.”

The South Korean Film Industry

Editors: Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, and Junhyung Cho
Publication Date: 2024

As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and film. Similarly, the exponential growth in the South Korean film industry has been mirrored by a growing body of industry and film policy forums and academic conferences in both the East and the West.

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea

Editors: Jesook Song & Michelle Cho
Publication Date: 2024

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking to interrogate the role of popular media in establishing and shaping gendered common sense, this volume fosters cross-disciplinary conversations linked by the central thesis that gender discourse and representation are central to the politics, aesthetics, and economics of contemporary South Korea. In the post-authoritarian period (the late 1980s to the #MeToo present), media representation and popular discourse changed the gender conventions that are found at the core of civic, political, and cultural debates.

Mediating the South Korean Other

Editor: David C. Oh
Publication Date: 2022

Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship.

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Critically Capitalist

The Postdevelopmental State

The South Korean Film Industry

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea

Mediating the South Korean Other

Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema

Korean Families Yesterday and Today

Revisiting Minjung New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

Rediscovering Korean Cinema

Entrepreneurial Seoulite Culture and Subjectivity in Hongdae, Seoul

Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea

Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s

Korean Communication, Media, and Culture: An Annotated Bibliography

Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea: Contemporary Research and Future Prospects

Transgression in Korea: Beyond Resistance and Control

Sport in Korea: History, Development, Management

Smartland Korea: Mobile Communication, Culture, and Society

Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea

Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media

Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee's Korea

Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method