A complex critique of how society constructs women of color in the academy combines with deeply p... more A complex critique of how society constructs women of color in the academy combines with deeply personal interludes and a polyphony of scholarly voices to demonstrate ways that their objectified bodies can not only resist but also improvise as they question what it means to be different.
Neoliberalizing Educational Reform: America’s Quest for Profitable Market-Colonies and the Undoing of Public Good, 2015
In trying to navigate the politics and policy of difference and contemporary school reform, we ha... more In trying to navigate the politics and policy of difference and contemporary school reform, we have experienced how competition for funding has become a policy practice that is re/de/forming higher education. Competition for funding knowledge production is never simply a meritocratic or linear activity but a political process.
Ohio State University, ED Policy and Leadership., 2002
This is a critical auto/ethnography of traveling women of Korean descent in U.S. higher education... more This is a critical auto/ethnography of traveling women of Korean descent in U.S. higher education. Our collective tales are generated between the names that each traveling woman utilizes to assert her subjectivities and the names that prescribe her subjective positions in-between the repertoires of Korea and the U.S. At this imagined and embodied site of "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," the study traces how we have been navigating multivalently narrated histories, cultural forms, and relations of Korea and the U.S. to make sense of our transnational localities. It also examines how each of us has strategically and ambivalently explored a traveling self through (un)intentional distancing, rejecting, merging and adopting the signs, practices and institutions of Korea and/or America, to free ourselves and to rework the worlds we are living in.
To make an observation of our historicity, I utilize the problematics and possibilities of the Metropolis/First and Colonized/Third World paradigm. Within the framework, I put together four distinct literatures: (1) foreign students in U.S. higher education; (2) history of migration between Korea and the U.S.; (3) the cultural politics of Asian/immigrants/Americans; and (4) the construction of Korean women in Korean nationalist cultural discourse. By weaving these literatures, I plot multiple routes that connect the different geographies, cultures, languages and politics in order to display how the term, "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," becomes imaginable for the study. In this way, the study attempts to draw connections and blur the distinctions between foreign student discourse, minority and majority politics in the U.S., and First and Third World inequalities.
"Decolonizing methodology" guides the methods and procedures for the study. Within the paradigm, I discuss the rhizomatic nature of the auto/ethnography that opens up the research field, the distance between the researcher and the researched, and the beginning and ending of the project.
Our tales recount different reasons and modes of our travels - temporary migration, immigration, emigration, adoption, returning, fleeing, constant shuttling, and/or living in both. Yet, I analyze how our traveling narratives are bound together by the fact that all of us are "stuck" in-between the recalcitrant signs of Korea and the U.S. where we share the predicaments of racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism and/or subordination. In this oxymoron space of stuck traveling, I examine our prolific acts of owning and disowning to make the best out of the circumstances, which create a new possibility for others to "cross paths with it or retrace it." The study also discusses how the global/multicultural discourse of U.S. higher education interacts with our narratives. This demands of educators to ask and to think differently about the place of U.S. higher education in global/local societies. Finally, I address how this project both confirms and destabilizes our "not unified collectivities." The dissertation ends with a discussion on the possibilities of "collective narratives of heterogeneities " in traveling worlds.
Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 2014
In this postcolonial inquiry, we analyze how spirituality has been simultaneously appropriated/re... more In this postcolonial inquiry, we analyze how spirituality has been simultaneously appropriated/re-covered and re-appropriated/recovered for the purpose of (re)colonizing as well as decolonizing projects. By drawing from discrete yet interconnected literatures of decolonizing, (post)(anti)colonial, Indigenous, and ethnic studies based theories, we discuss the concept of transformative spirituality as a useful analytic lens. This project intersects with larger questions of neo/colonial historical and social structures and conditions of life such as empire, nation-state, race, gender, etc. Transformative aspects of spirituality not only critique how spirituality of the Others has been appropriated within the neo/colonial and neoliberal imagination for the salvation of the Western/neoliberal Self but also speaks about how spirituality can be a space of possibility or recovery for different marginalized communities. While providing decolonizing critiques on the current popularity of spirituality in Western societies as Orientalism and (re)colonization of the Others, we present how transformative spirituality can be mobilized to open up a space beyond Western-modern-colonial-scientific knowledge/truth/power regimes to serve political emancipatory goals. Despite historically situated different approaches toward decolonizing across variously colonized communities, our analysis on spirituality demonstrates how marginalized communities have always critiqued Orientalist spirituality and developed alternative spaces of spirituality that seek social change and transformative politics.
Combining the conceptual approach of racial formation and racial projects with the Foucauldian co... more Combining the conceptual approach of racial formation and racial projects with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Jeong‐eun Rhee theorizes the “neoliberal racial project” (NRP) and examines contemporary meanings and operations of race and racism in relation to neoliberalism. She analyzes Amy Chua's popular parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, as a specific case of the NRP, and demonstrates how in this text race is pressed to work in new — neoliberal — ways, re/generating different kinds of categories and meanings, yet also continuously drawing upon old categories and meanings, to effect and rationalize social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation. What is noteworthy is the way in which racial neoliberalism builds silently on the structural conditions of racism while disabling the very categories of their recognizability. Consequently, Rhee argues for new, historically bounded theories that can articulate how the meanings, categories, and concepts of races are constantly being reconfigured.
This project began as a content analysis of five South Korean high school Social Studies textbook... more This project began as a content analysis of five South Korean high school Social Studies textbooks. Yet, it has evolved into an epistemological experiment to pursue the question of “what does it mean to leave America for Asia, at least methodologically, for the researcher who left Asia for America?” Using the textbooks as a mediating site, therefore, I articulate a process that engages with, moves toward, and develops deimperializing methodology. More specifically, I interweaveKuan-HsingChen’s Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010) with my data by analyzing the data through Asia as Method and reading and practicing Asia as Method as methodology. This allows me to move away from fixating on the West as a reference point even through my critique. Rather, I work to produce geo-historically grounded knowledge for specific interventions at this mediating site toward the movements of decolonization, de-cold war, and deimperialization. In the process, I discuss how Asia as Method as methodology provokes political, psychological, and social engagements of everyday, multiplies reference points for knowledge production, and requires a researcher to re-work on one’s subjectivity inevitably constituted by imperialism.
(2013). A Review of “Ecojustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communitie... more (2013). A Review of “Ecojustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities”. Educational Studies: Vol. 49, Eco-Democratic Reforms in Education, pp. 465-470
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013
By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her po... more By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop’s fable, “the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast.” In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting her postcolonial feminist subjectivity with the positioning of the bat in the fable, the author re-engages with the moral of the story that instructs exclusive loyalty, and highlights the promiscuous potential of the bat. Through this re-engagement, she examines how feminist researcher subjectivity, epistemology, and methodology can function both as the demand of exclusive loyalty and as the transgressive desire and move (of the bat). Then, how can she both refuse and take refuge in feminist research? The promiscuity of wanting and doing both is a contradiction that enables the author to re-visit her research with Korean working class parents in New York City schools, which she thought she had failed two years ago. Through three accounts of failure that involve (1) the divide between the condition of researcher employment and the needs of the field; (2) the divide between usable and unusable data; and (3) the divide between theoretical complexity and material simplicity, the author discusses how she promiscuously – persistently and patiently – re-engages with these divides in her failed research.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013
This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist met... more This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist methodology came to read our own work as promiscuous and interpret the terms “feminist” and “feminism” through both practice and theory. It marks the circulation of the term “promiscuous feminist methodology” and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The use of the phrase “promiscuous feminist” to describe methodology is not merely an attention-seeking oxymoron, though we hope that its irony is not lost. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of “feminists gone wild” tantalizing, though what we put forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. Because the theories we put to work “get dirty” as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices, promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. Set in motion by anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of feeling out of place in the academy and in feminism, we examine our personal, academic, and political engagement with these contradictions that became the springboard for this special issue.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2010
As im/migrant researchers of color working and living in the USA, we begin this article by discus... more As im/migrant researchers of color working and living in the USA, we begin this article by discussing how our own transnational selves and research have created tensions with the normalized use of socially constructed and theorized categories and differences in US qualitative research practices. We theorize an alternative reflexive mode of conceptualizing a researcher self that can illuminate more contextually engaging understanding and relationships between researcher and researched within our transnational research contexts. We argue that our reflexive approach to researcher self as non‐unitary I, circulatory mode of porous and shifting entities simultaneously fracturing and morphing into each other in relation to its changing webs of relationships and history, can bring different ways of understanding and working with the ever changing and interconnected global‐local cultural, social, and political conditions and contexts of education and research.
Utilizing a Foucauldian model of “governmentality” in the context of the new imperialism and co... more Utilizing a Foucauldian model of “governmentality” in the context of the new imperialism and conceptualizing international education as an apparatus of contemporary global power relation, this paper examines what kind of a globally educated self is narrated, imagined, and constructed in Korean international education discourse and practice. Considering its specific context where US higher education is perceived as the most dominant and thus desired model of international education, the paper attempts to bring a more nuanced understanding on the dynamics of education and power relations between Korea and the US as the interplay of the new imperialism and subjectivity. Drawing from student authored trade books along with ethnographic and artifact data collected in Korea, the paper maps out three levels of discursive practices - national, educational, and individual levels - on international education in Korea. By analyzing the emerging discourse and practice of a globally educated (elite) self across these three levels, the paper discusses how these practices and discourses of self are coordinated and regulated and how individuals internalize this new identity. In doing so, the analysis reveals further about the politics of international education through which educational imagination, desire and identity are now implicated in the work of the new imperialism.
In this article, I narrate a self‐reflexive inquiry on the process of becoming an Asian/Korean im... more In this article, I narrate a self‐reflexive inquiry on the process of becoming an Asian/Korean immigrant woman of color in the US. The purpose is to provide a particular insight and identity site to address the urgent need to examine ways in which the increasing number of postcolonial immigrants of color and US racial minorities engage with each other to make sense of our intersected but very differential impacts of racism. The article is organized using three vignettes on differently racialized encounters – my arrival to the racialized ruins of Korea town in LA as a newcomer, a recurring encounter with a racial epithet that defines me as Chinese, and an anti‐racism session in an educational conference where I was disclaimed from being a person of color by another racialized group. Through these vignettes, I analyze the complex dynamics between very personal, affective experience and socio‐political structure and actions that have constituted my still evolving palimpsest identity. In conclusion, I argue for the significance of performing open eye/I that risks being wounded again by not clinging to an unquestionable ideal of who we are and rather using it as a base to learn with others. This is to live those unknown possibilities of becoming through infinite practices of anti‐racism toward the absence of racism.
Through auto-ethnographic approach, this article extends contemporary debates on the need to furt... more Through auto-ethnographic approach, this article extends contemporary debates on the need to further conceptualize and practice collaborative approaches to research. By exploring the complex dimensions of collaboration, this discus- sion traces the challenges of researching communities one affiliates with, particularly in relation to ethnic, cultural, and “unusual” researcher-researched positional differences. Also, by describing the dilemmas faced in translating languages spoken by respondents, the authors explain how the issues of lan- guage and representation complicate the collaborative relationships of research. This discussion proposes that investigators reexamine how they have interacted with participants in everyday contexts and aims to help researchers redefine the meaning of collaborative research across differences.
A complex critique of how society constructs women of color in the academy combines with deeply p... more A complex critique of how society constructs women of color in the academy combines with deeply personal interludes and a polyphony of scholarly voices to demonstrate ways that their objectified bodies can not only resist but also improvise as they question what it means to be different.
Neoliberalizing Educational Reform: America’s Quest for Profitable Market-Colonies and the Undoing of Public Good, 2015
In trying to navigate the politics and policy of difference and contemporary school reform, we ha... more In trying to navigate the politics and policy of difference and contemporary school reform, we have experienced how competition for funding has become a policy practice that is re/de/forming higher education. Competition for funding knowledge production is never simply a meritocratic or linear activity but a political process.
Ohio State University, ED Policy and Leadership., 2002
This is a critical auto/ethnography of traveling women of Korean descent in U.S. higher education... more This is a critical auto/ethnography of traveling women of Korean descent in U.S. higher education. Our collective tales are generated between the names that each traveling woman utilizes to assert her subjectivities and the names that prescribe her subjective positions in-between the repertoires of Korea and the U.S. At this imagined and embodied site of "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," the study traces how we have been navigating multivalently narrated histories, cultural forms, and relations of Korea and the U.S. to make sense of our transnational localities. It also examines how each of us has strategically and ambivalently explored a traveling self through (un)intentional distancing, rejecting, merging and adopting the signs, practices and institutions of Korea and/or America, to free ourselves and to rework the worlds we are living in.
To make an observation of our historicity, I utilize the problematics and possibilities of the Metropolis/First and Colonized/Third World paradigm. Within the framework, I put together four distinct literatures: (1) foreign students in U.S. higher education; (2) history of migration between Korea and the U.S.; (3) the cultural politics of Asian/immigrants/Americans; and (4) the construction of Korean women in Korean nationalist cultural discourse. By weaving these literatures, I plot multiple routes that connect the different geographies, cultures, languages and politics in order to display how the term, "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," becomes imaginable for the study. In this way, the study attempts to draw connections and blur the distinctions between foreign student discourse, minority and majority politics in the U.S., and First and Third World inequalities.
"Decolonizing methodology" guides the methods and procedures for the study. Within the paradigm, I discuss the rhizomatic nature of the auto/ethnography that opens up the research field, the distance between the researcher and the researched, and the beginning and ending of the project.
Our tales recount different reasons and modes of our travels - temporary migration, immigration, emigration, adoption, returning, fleeing, constant shuttling, and/or living in both. Yet, I analyze how our traveling narratives are bound together by the fact that all of us are "stuck" in-between the recalcitrant signs of Korea and the U.S. where we share the predicaments of racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism and/or subordination. In this oxymoron space of stuck traveling, I examine our prolific acts of owning and disowning to make the best out of the circumstances, which create a new possibility for others to "cross paths with it or retrace it." The study also discusses how the global/multicultural discourse of U.S. higher education interacts with our narratives. This demands of educators to ask and to think differently about the place of U.S. higher education in global/local societies. Finally, I address how this project both confirms and destabilizes our "not unified collectivities." The dissertation ends with a discussion on the possibilities of "collective narratives of heterogeneities " in traveling worlds.
Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 2014
In this postcolonial inquiry, we analyze how spirituality has been simultaneously appropriated/re... more In this postcolonial inquiry, we analyze how spirituality has been simultaneously appropriated/re-covered and re-appropriated/recovered for the purpose of (re)colonizing as well as decolonizing projects. By drawing from discrete yet interconnected literatures of decolonizing, (post)(anti)colonial, Indigenous, and ethnic studies based theories, we discuss the concept of transformative spirituality as a useful analytic lens. This project intersects with larger questions of neo/colonial historical and social structures and conditions of life such as empire, nation-state, race, gender, etc. Transformative aspects of spirituality not only critique how spirituality of the Others has been appropriated within the neo/colonial and neoliberal imagination for the salvation of the Western/neoliberal Self but also speaks about how spirituality can be a space of possibility or recovery for different marginalized communities. While providing decolonizing critiques on the current popularity of spirituality in Western societies as Orientalism and (re)colonization of the Others, we present how transformative spirituality can be mobilized to open up a space beyond Western-modern-colonial-scientific knowledge/truth/power regimes to serve political emancipatory goals. Despite historically situated different approaches toward decolonizing across variously colonized communities, our analysis on spirituality demonstrates how marginalized communities have always critiqued Orientalist spirituality and developed alternative spaces of spirituality that seek social change and transformative politics.
Combining the conceptual approach of racial formation and racial projects with the Foucauldian co... more Combining the conceptual approach of racial formation and racial projects with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Jeong‐eun Rhee theorizes the “neoliberal racial project” (NRP) and examines contemporary meanings and operations of race and racism in relation to neoliberalism. She analyzes Amy Chua's popular parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, as a specific case of the NRP, and demonstrates how in this text race is pressed to work in new — neoliberal — ways, re/generating different kinds of categories and meanings, yet also continuously drawing upon old categories and meanings, to effect and rationalize social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation. What is noteworthy is the way in which racial neoliberalism builds silently on the structural conditions of racism while disabling the very categories of their recognizability. Consequently, Rhee argues for new, historically bounded theories that can articulate how the meanings, categories, and concepts of races are constantly being reconfigured.
This project began as a content analysis of five South Korean high school Social Studies textbook... more This project began as a content analysis of five South Korean high school Social Studies textbooks. Yet, it has evolved into an epistemological experiment to pursue the question of “what does it mean to leave America for Asia, at least methodologically, for the researcher who left Asia for America?” Using the textbooks as a mediating site, therefore, I articulate a process that engages with, moves toward, and develops deimperializing methodology. More specifically, I interweaveKuan-HsingChen’s Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010) with my data by analyzing the data through Asia as Method and reading and practicing Asia as Method as methodology. This allows me to move away from fixating on the West as a reference point even through my critique. Rather, I work to produce geo-historically grounded knowledge for specific interventions at this mediating site toward the movements of decolonization, de-cold war, and deimperialization. In the process, I discuss how Asia as Method as methodology provokes political, psychological, and social engagements of everyday, multiplies reference points for knowledge production, and requires a researcher to re-work on one’s subjectivity inevitably constituted by imperialism.
(2013). A Review of “Ecojustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communitie... more (2013). A Review of “Ecojustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities”. Educational Studies: Vol. 49, Eco-Democratic Reforms in Education, pp. 465-470
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013
By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her po... more By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop’s fable, “the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast.” In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting her postcolonial feminist subjectivity with the positioning of the bat in the fable, the author re-engages with the moral of the story that instructs exclusive loyalty, and highlights the promiscuous potential of the bat. Through this re-engagement, she examines how feminist researcher subjectivity, epistemology, and methodology can function both as the demand of exclusive loyalty and as the transgressive desire and move (of the bat). Then, how can she both refuse and take refuge in feminist research? The promiscuity of wanting and doing both is a contradiction that enables the author to re-visit her research with Korean working class parents in New York City schools, which she thought she had failed two years ago. Through three accounts of failure that involve (1) the divide between the condition of researcher employment and the needs of the field; (2) the divide between usable and unusable data; and (3) the divide between theoretical complexity and material simplicity, the author discusses how she promiscuously – persistently and patiently – re-engages with these divides in her failed research.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013
This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist met... more This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist methodology came to read our own work as promiscuous and interpret the terms “feminist” and “feminism” through both practice and theory. It marks the circulation of the term “promiscuous feminist methodology” and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The use of the phrase “promiscuous feminist” to describe methodology is not merely an attention-seeking oxymoron, though we hope that its irony is not lost. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of “feminists gone wild” tantalizing, though what we put forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. Because the theories we put to work “get dirty” as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices, promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. Set in motion by anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of feeling out of place in the academy and in feminism, we examine our personal, academic, and political engagement with these contradictions that became the springboard for this special issue.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2010
As im/migrant researchers of color working and living in the USA, we begin this article by discus... more As im/migrant researchers of color working and living in the USA, we begin this article by discussing how our own transnational selves and research have created tensions with the normalized use of socially constructed and theorized categories and differences in US qualitative research practices. We theorize an alternative reflexive mode of conceptualizing a researcher self that can illuminate more contextually engaging understanding and relationships between researcher and researched within our transnational research contexts. We argue that our reflexive approach to researcher self as non‐unitary I, circulatory mode of porous and shifting entities simultaneously fracturing and morphing into each other in relation to its changing webs of relationships and history, can bring different ways of understanding and working with the ever changing and interconnected global‐local cultural, social, and political conditions and contexts of education and research.
Utilizing a Foucauldian model of “governmentality” in the context of the new imperialism and co... more Utilizing a Foucauldian model of “governmentality” in the context of the new imperialism and conceptualizing international education as an apparatus of contemporary global power relation, this paper examines what kind of a globally educated self is narrated, imagined, and constructed in Korean international education discourse and practice. Considering its specific context where US higher education is perceived as the most dominant and thus desired model of international education, the paper attempts to bring a more nuanced understanding on the dynamics of education and power relations between Korea and the US as the interplay of the new imperialism and subjectivity. Drawing from student authored trade books along with ethnographic and artifact data collected in Korea, the paper maps out three levels of discursive practices - national, educational, and individual levels - on international education in Korea. By analyzing the emerging discourse and practice of a globally educated (elite) self across these three levels, the paper discusses how these practices and discourses of self are coordinated and regulated and how individuals internalize this new identity. In doing so, the analysis reveals further about the politics of international education through which educational imagination, desire and identity are now implicated in the work of the new imperialism.
In this article, I narrate a self‐reflexive inquiry on the process of becoming an Asian/Korean im... more In this article, I narrate a self‐reflexive inquiry on the process of becoming an Asian/Korean immigrant woman of color in the US. The purpose is to provide a particular insight and identity site to address the urgent need to examine ways in which the increasing number of postcolonial immigrants of color and US racial minorities engage with each other to make sense of our intersected but very differential impacts of racism. The article is organized using three vignettes on differently racialized encounters – my arrival to the racialized ruins of Korea town in LA as a newcomer, a recurring encounter with a racial epithet that defines me as Chinese, and an anti‐racism session in an educational conference where I was disclaimed from being a person of color by another racialized group. Through these vignettes, I analyze the complex dynamics between very personal, affective experience and socio‐political structure and actions that have constituted my still evolving palimpsest identity. In conclusion, I argue for the significance of performing open eye/I that risks being wounded again by not clinging to an unquestionable ideal of who we are and rather using it as a base to learn with others. This is to live those unknown possibilities of becoming through infinite practices of anti‐racism toward the absence of racism.
Through auto-ethnographic approach, this article extends contemporary debates on the need to furt... more Through auto-ethnographic approach, this article extends contemporary debates on the need to further conceptualize and practice collaborative approaches to research. By exploring the complex dimensions of collaboration, this discus- sion traces the challenges of researching communities one affiliates with, particularly in relation to ethnic, cultural, and “unusual” researcher-researched positional differences. Also, by describing the dilemmas faced in translating languages spoken by respondents, the authors explain how the issues of lan- guage and representation complicate the collaborative relationships of research. This discussion proposes that investigators reexamine how they have interacted with participants in everyday contexts and aims to help researchers redefine the meaning of collaborative research across differences.
In Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee embarks on a deep... more In Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee embarks on a deeply personal inquiry that is demanded by her dead mother’s haunting rememory and pursues what has become her work/life question: What methodologies are available to notice and study a reality that exceeds and defies modern scientific ontology and intelligibility?
Rhee is a Korean migrant American educational qualitative researcher, who learns anew how to notice, feel, research, and write her mother’s rememory across time, geography, languages, and ways of knowing and being. She draws on Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "fragmented-multi self." Using various genres such as poems, dialogues, fictions, and theories, Rhee documents a multi-layered process of conceptualizing, researching, and writing her (m/others’) transnational rememory as a collective knowledge project of intergenerational decolonial feminists of color. In doing so, the book addresses the following questions: How can researchers write in the name and practice of research what can never be known or narrated with logic and reason? What methodologies can be used to work through and with both personal and collective losses, wounds, and connections that have become y/our questions?
Rhee shows how to feel connectivity and fragmentation as/of self not as binary but as constitutive through rememory and invites readers to explore possibilities of decolonial feminist research as an affective bridge to imagine, rememory, and engender healing knowledge. Embodied onto-epistemologies of women of color haunt and thus demand researchers to contest and cross the boundary of questions, topics, methodologies, and academic disciplinary knowledge that are counted as relevant, appropriate, and legitimate within a dominant western science regime. This book is for qualitative researchers and feminism scholars who are pursuing these kinds of boundary-crossing "personal" inquiries.
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Papers by jeong-eun rhee
To make an observation of our historicity, I utilize the problematics and possibilities of the Metropolis/First and Colonized/Third World paradigm. Within the framework, I put together four distinct literatures: (1) foreign students in U.S. higher education; (2) history of migration between Korea and the U.S.; (3) the cultural politics of Asian/immigrants/Americans; and (4) the construction of Korean women in Korean nationalist cultural discourse. By weaving these literatures, I plot multiple routes that connect the different geographies, cultures, languages and politics in order to display how the term, "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," becomes imaginable for the study. In this way, the study attempts to draw connections and blur the distinctions between foreign student discourse, minority and majority politics in the U.S., and First and Third World inequalities.
"Decolonizing methodology" guides the methods and procedures for the study. Within the paradigm, I discuss the rhizomatic nature of the auto/ethnography that opens up the research field, the distance between the researcher and the researched, and the beginning and ending of the project.
Our tales recount different reasons and modes of our travels - temporary migration, immigration, emigration, adoption, returning, fleeing, constant shuttling, and/or living in both. Yet, I analyze how our traveling narratives are bound together by the fact that all of us are "stuck" in-between the recalcitrant signs of Korea and the U.S. where we share the predicaments of racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism and/or subordination. In this oxymoron space of stuck traveling, I examine our prolific acts of owning and disowning to make the best out of the circumstances, which create a new possibility for others to "cross paths with it or retrace it." The study also discusses how the global/multicultural discourse of U.S. higher education interacts with our narratives. This demands of educators to ask and to think differently about the place of U.S. higher education in global/local societies. Finally, I address how this project both confirms and destabilizes our "not unified collectivities." The dissertation ends with a discussion on the possibilities of "collective narratives of heterogeneities " in traveling worlds.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/pqXMTSueU5gTHCEUjRWR/.VCa4hEuabgI
To make an observation of our historicity, I utilize the problematics and possibilities of the Metropolis/First and Colonized/Third World paradigm. Within the framework, I put together four distinct literatures: (1) foreign students in U.S. higher education; (2) history of migration between Korea and the U.S.; (3) the cultural politics of Asian/immigrants/Americans; and (4) the construction of Korean women in Korean nationalist cultural discourse. By weaving these literatures, I plot multiple routes that connect the different geographies, cultures, languages and politics in order to display how the term, "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," becomes imaginable for the study. In this way, the study attempts to draw connections and blur the distinctions between foreign student discourse, minority and majority politics in the U.S., and First and Third World inequalities.
"Decolonizing methodology" guides the methods and procedures for the study. Within the paradigm, I discuss the rhizomatic nature of the auto/ethnography that opens up the research field, the distance between the researcher and the researched, and the beginning and ending of the project.
Our tales recount different reasons and modes of our travels - temporary migration, immigration, emigration, adoption, returning, fleeing, constant shuttling, and/or living in both. Yet, I analyze how our traveling narratives are bound together by the fact that all of us are "stuck" in-between the recalcitrant signs of Korea and the U.S. where we share the predicaments of racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism and/or subordination. In this oxymoron space of stuck traveling, I examine our prolific acts of owning and disowning to make the best out of the circumstances, which create a new possibility for others to "cross paths with it or retrace it." The study also discusses how the global/multicultural discourse of U.S. higher education interacts with our narratives. This demands of educators to ask and to think differently about the place of U.S. higher education in global/local societies. Finally, I address how this project both confirms and destabilizes our "not unified collectivities." The dissertation ends with a discussion on the possibilities of "collective narratives of heterogeneities " in traveling worlds.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/pqXMTSueU5gTHCEUjRWR/.VCa4hEuabgI
Rhee is a Korean migrant American educational qualitative researcher, who learns anew how to notice, feel, research, and write her mother’s rememory across time, geography, languages, and ways of knowing and being. She draws on Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "fragmented-multi self." Using various genres such as poems, dialogues, fictions, and theories, Rhee documents a multi-layered process of conceptualizing, researching, and writing her (m/others’) transnational rememory as a collective knowledge project of intergenerational decolonial feminists of color. In doing so, the book addresses the following questions: How can researchers write in the name and practice of research what can never be known or narrated with logic and reason? What methodologies can be used to work through and with both personal and collective losses, wounds, and connections that have become y/our questions?
Rhee shows how to feel connectivity and fragmentation as/of self not as binary but as constitutive through rememory and invites readers to explore possibilities of decolonial feminist research as an affective bridge to imagine, rememory, and engender healing knowledge. Embodied onto-epistemologies of women of color haunt and thus demand researchers to contest and cross the boundary of questions, topics, methodologies, and academic disciplinary knowledge that are counted as relevant, appropriate, and legitimate within a dominant western science regime. This book is for qualitative researchers and feminism scholars who are pursuing these kinds of boundary-crossing "personal" inquiries.