via moreweepingThe University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will present Dr. Jiyeon Kang and her talk "Belonging Otherwise: Chinese Undergraduate Students at South Korean Universities" on November 1, part of the center's Asian Now Fall Lecture Series.
Following the South Korean government’s drive in the 1990s for globalization and deregulation of higher education, Korean universities aggressively recruited Chinese students as both symbolic and economic resources. The number of Chinese students studying at Korean universities consequently increased 57-fold between 2000 and 2019 (from 1,200 to 68,537). This presentation will share the findings from interviews with some of these Chinese students, who chose South Korea with academic and cultural aspirations but often found that neither Korean students nor the university itself welcomed them into classes or communities. As a result, Chinese students have not adapted to Korean university in the ways imagined by the normative framework, but instead make their study-abroad experience livable by constituting material, technological, and imagined modalities of belonging. These modalities of “belonging otherwise” reveal South Korea as a node of commercialized, non-elite, inter-Asian student mobility, and illuminate Chinese students’ strategies in this new regime of study abroad.It runs from 4:30 to 5:45 pm in 211 Lawrence Hall, and is free and open to members of the Pitt community who abide by the university's health guidelines.
