Short description:

This book explores the process of identity (re)construction among mixed-heritage children within the context of globalization. This book is key for scholars in applied linguistics, intercultural communication, and Asian studies.

Long description:

This book explores the process of identity (re)construction among mixed-heritage children within the context of globalization through the lens of its intersection with Korean society.

The volume illustrates how these multicultural children mediate hybrid social spaces and examines their personal approaches toward translating, resisting, and transforming the entanglements engendered in those spaces. By tracing the trajectories of their identity (re)formations over several years, the book details the paths these youths have taken to navigate diverse contact zones and cope with institutional regulatory mechanisms. It highlights that, in the face of prevailing social stigma, they actively involve themselves in political action in their day-to-day lives: they redefine what it means to be Korean and/but multicultural, challenge simplistic membership boundaries, and develop unique strategies to resist and subsist. These efforts to question the essentialist logic of authenticity demonstrate that these youths, situated at the convergence of globalization, migration, inequality, and political power, represent a challenge to both national and global orders.

Arguing that ecological perspectives need to direct greater attention toward the political as well as the posthumanist dimensions of language, culture, and identity, this book is key reading for scholars in applied linguistics, intercultural communication, and Asian studies.

Table of Contents:

Table of Contents, Foreword, Acknowledgements, Transcript convention, PART I, Introduction, 1. The need for a comprehensive theoretical framework for research on mixed-race children, 2. A structuralist approach to language, culture, and identity, 3. Principal characteristics of ecological theories, 4. A poststructuralist approach to language, culture, and identity?and other key concepts in ecological theories, 4.1. Language, 4.2. Culture, 4.3. Identity, 5. The intersection of the key pillars of applied linguistics in the context of globalization, 6. The Organization of the Book, Chapter 1. The Context of Research, 1. The imagined community of South Korea and the ideologies of mono-, 2. A social, political, and economic backdrop of brokered international marriages, 3. The emergence of multicultural families as a local manifestation of globalization, 4. Discourses about multicultural children, Chapter 2: Researching Multicultural Children and Their Lives, 1. The methodological framework, 2. Research questions, 3. The study participants: Six multicultural children, 3.1. Heedong, 3.2. Tayo, 3.3. Sungho, 3.4. Hayang, 3.5. Jinsoo, 3.6. Artanis, 4. The project, 4.1. In 2014, 4.2. Since 2015, 5. Data organization, 6. Data analysis, 7. The researcher and the researched, PART II, Chapter 3. Inhabiting an Intervening Space, 1. Hybridity, 2. Breathing with multiple languages and cultures at home, 2.1. Heedong, 2.2. Hayang, 3. Joining mothers? non-Korean tetworks, 3.1. Tayo, 3.2. Jinsoo, 4. Blurring the subtle dividing lines between inclusion and cxclusion, 4.1. Sungho, 4.2. Artanis, 5. Conclusion, Chapter 4. Recognizing Discursive Incompatibilities, 1. Hetroglossic contradictions, 2. Becoming aware of the vulnerability associated with the multicultural category, 2.1. Heedong, 2.2. Artanis, 3. Deciphering the multicultural category, 3.1. Sungho, 3.2. Hayang, 4. Maneuvering the ambivalent boundary between native and multicultural, 4.1. Tayo, 4.2. Jinsoo, 5. Conclusion, Chapter 5. Subsisting through Political Action, 1. Various forms of resistance within hegemonic spaces, 2. Mediating mutually incomprehensible languages, 2.1. Heedong, 2.2. Jinsoo, 3. Searching for ways to be part of the mainstream society, 3.1. Sungho, 3.2. Tayo, 4. Testing varying semiotic resources for communication, 4.1. Hayang, 4.2. Artanis, 5. Conclusion, PART III, Chapter 6. The Ideological and Ecological Relation Between Structure and Agency, 1. Multicultural children as an object of knowledge under the reign of homogeneity, 2. Multicultural children as active agents in searching for new possibilities, 3. Multicultural teenagers: Not sovereign protagonists, 4. The dialectic tension between social structure and agency, 5. A call for the historicization of structure and the relocation of agency, 6. The convergence of political economy, ecological perspectives, and posthumanism, 7. Conclusion, Chapter 7: Ecological Perspectives and the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Identity in an Era of Globalization, 1. Rethinking the multicultural category and multiculturalism in Korea, 2. Capitalizing on heteroglossia and the paradoxical reproduction of neoliberal hegemony, 3. The potential communicability of everything and the notion of the multilingual subject, 4. Historicity and the perpetual process of becoming, 5. Conclusion, Conclusion, 1. Lessons native Koreans should learn from the lives of multicultural youth, 2. Cultivating collective self-interest and calling for non-fascistic forms of existence, 3. The intersectionality between the multicultural category and varying social relations, 4. Conclusion, References, Index