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2022 Korea Update

Korea Update

Speaker

Professor Ruediger Frank, University of Vienna; Assistant Professor Judy Han, UCLA; and various speakers.

Venue

Molonglo Theatre, Level 2, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

Date

Monday, 21 November, 2022 - 16:00 to Tuesday, 22 November, 2022 - 17:30

The ANU Korea Update is the University’s flagship annual conference on Korea. This year’s Korea Update is introducing a hybrid format. The ANU Korea Institute is bringing together academics from all over the world to talk about all things Korea, whilst also presenting the event online. We are lucky enough to have esteemed economist Ruediger Frank deliver the opening keynote, and renowned cultural geographer Judy Han deliver the closing keynote.

 
Spread across two days, the 2022 Korea Update is a public event bringing together key representatives from the academic and policymaking communities to discuss current socio-cultural, political, diplomatic, gender and security issues related to the Korean peninsula.
 

Keynotes

North Korea after Ukraine

Professor Ruediger Frank , University of Vienna

Monday 21 November 5pm-6pm

It is difficult to think of any country that would be unaffected by the armed conflict in Ukraine and its geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences. However, in the case of North Korea, these effects go far beyond quantitative changes such as inflation, reduced energy security, or increased defense budgets. Rather, they are of a substantial and qualitative nature. The Ukraine conflict has become a catalyst of events that lead the world into a new Cold War and, once again, facilitate the formation of two antagonistic blocs.
 
This keynote will outline some of the key changes and show that they make many of the North Korea related discussions among academics and analysts in the past two decades irrelevant, and in fact require a complete reorganisation of the debate. 
 
Ruediger Frank is Professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna, where he is also Director of the European Centre for North Korean Studies. He was born and raised in socialist East Germany and lived for five years in the Soviet Union, experienced German Unification first hand as a 21-year-old, and shortly thereafter spent one semester as a language student at Kim-Il-Sung University in Pyongyang in 1991/1992. He holds an MA in Korean Studies and International Relations, and a PhD in Economics.
 
On the basis of these skills and experiences, he has written extensively on various topics related to North Korea, including economic history during the 1950s, the connections between ideology and economic reform after the 1990s famine, the transformation of state-socialism, tourism and trade, the political economy of unification, and many more. He has been working in various Korea-related councils of the World Economic Forum and was named one of the 50 most influential German economists by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2012. He tweets as @RFrankVienna.
 

Queer throughlines: Activist lines and uneven geometries in South Korea and the diaspora

Assitant Professor Judy Han, UCLA

Tuesday 22 November 4.30pm-5.30pm

Queer and trans activists in South Korea—alternatively referred to as iban, sexual minority, or LGBTQ+ activists—have made important political and policy gains, and their visibility has grown significantly over the last two decades. They continue to face, however, deep-seated heterosexism and dismissiveness from liberals as well as intense political hostility especially from religious conservatives.
 
The fraught space of evangelical Christianity in particular has been an especially crucial site for queer politics, both as a key source of antipathy as well as a wellspring of support and allyship. Tracing a transnational account through these contentious political spaces of queer and trans activisms in South Korea and the Korean diaspora in the United States.
 
In this keynote Judy Han discusses how they have crisscrossed and intertwined with each other as well as adjacent movements and social forces. Considering these lines of engagement and relationality through a spatial lens, she suggests a more capacious and ambivalent conceptualisation of linearity.
 
Ju Hui Judy Han is a cultural geographer (PhD, UC Berkeley) and assistant professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writings about queer feminist politics, religion, and protest appear in journals such as Journal of Korean Studies, Critical Asian Studies, and Journal of Asian Studies and in several edited books such as Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval (2022), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and Territories of Poverty (2015).
 
Her public scholarship has won support from the University of California Humanities Research Institute as well as the inaugural Barbra Streisand Fellowship on Truth in the Public Sphere from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. She is working on a book manuscript on queer activism in South Korea and the diaspora and co-writing another book with Jennifer J. Chun on protest repertoires.
 

Program

Monday 21 November

4pm-4.30pm Light refreshments
 
4.30pm WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
  • Ambassador His Excellency Jeong-sik Kang, Embassy of the Republic of Korea to the Australia
  • Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt, ANU
  • Moderators: Associate Professor Ruth Barraclough and Dr Eunseon Kim, ANU
 
5pm KEYNOTE: North Korea after Ukraine
  • Professor Ruediger Frank, Vienna University 
  • Moderator: Associate Professor Roald Maliangkaij, ANU

Tuesday 22 November

9am PANEL ONE: Korea's relations with the world
  • Professor Kyounghee Moon, Changwon National University
  • Dr Lauren Richardson, ANU
  • Dr Leonid Petrov, ANU
  • Moderator: Dr Peter Lee, University of Melbourne
10.40am - 11am Morning tea break
 
11am PANEL TWO: Global North Korea
  • Dr Eun Ah Cho, University of Sydney
  • Professor Justin Hastings, University of Sydney
  • Moderator: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang, ANU
12pm-1pm PANEL THREE: Politics in South Korea
  • Associate Professor Jennifer Chun, UCLA
  • Professor Kyung Moon Hwang, ANU
  • Moderator: Professor Kyounghee Moon, Changwon National University
1pm-2pm Lunch break
 
2pm PANEL FOUR: Economy
  • Assistant Professor Peter Kwon, University at Albany 
  • Dr Sung Young Kim, Macquarie University
  • Moderator: Ms Georgina Carnegie, Australia Korea Business Council
3pm PANEL FIVE: Culture
  • Dr Benoit Berthelier, University of Sydney
  • Dr Hilary Finchum-Sung, Association for Asian Studies
  • Moderator: Dr Eunseon Kim, ANU
4pm-4.30pm Afternoon refreshments
 
4.30pm KEYNOTE: Queer throughlines: Activist lines and uneven geometries in South Korea and the diaspora
  • Assistant Professor Judy Han, UCLA
  • Moderator: Associate Professor Ruth Barraclough, ANU

 

VENUE
 
The conference will be held in hybrid mode, i.e., in-person on ANU Campus, and virtually on Zoom.
 
IN-PERSON: Molonglo Theatre, Level 2, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU, Acton, 2600 ACT
ONLINE:  Register on Zoom. 
 

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