(BA, Wellesley College; Masters, Seoul National University; PhD, Queen’s University Belfast). My research focus has been on how an illiberal state like North Korea creates the international as a space of politics. I also study the role visuality and aesthetics in International Relations theory. My current book-length research examines Asia-Africa relations through North Korean cultural diplomacy projects and political theory. Address: School of People Environment and Planning Massey University Auckland Private Bag 102904 North Shore Mail Centre Auckland 0745 New Zealand
Why do we care and are so easily made to care about North Korea? What do we care about exactly wh... more Why do we care and are so easily made to care about North Korea? What do we care about exactly when we pay attention to places like North Korea? What does our care accomplish? To answer these questions, who 'we' are and how we care about North Korea need as much interrogation as what is going on inside North Korean government, society, economy and imagination. The book explores issues of relations, i.e. how we relate to, stand in relation and establish relationships in and through frameworks of security, human rights, humanitarianism and development. To frame the 'North Korea problem' as a problem of relations is to highlight how shifts away from objectifying North Korean actors and things are possible. In this book, I examine the intercultural dimensions of Western and South Korean encounters with North Korea that have achieved wide circulation among experts and laypersons alike (albeit to different degrees and significance). I examine various popular cultural genres - graphic novels, memoirs, photography, films and novels, but no, I do not talk about the American macho/misogynistic James Bond movie and Team America.
Emerging research on North Korean art mainly reads North Korean art, art theory and art instituti... more Emerging research on North Korean art mainly reads North Korean art, art theory and art institutions for the roles they play in sustaining North Korean authoritarian political system. To counter this trend, I turn to North Korean art and art/political theory to critique the deployment of authoritarianism in international research on North Korea and more fundamentally, to interrogate prevailing conceptions of sovereignty that feed into contemporary international interventionist practices. I begin by problematising the hierarchy in international politics that the authoritarian framework reifies and illustrate how North Korean juche ideology can be read to complicate how sovereign relations work, feel and look in North Korea and beyond. I turn my analytical focus to North Korean paintings that circulate globally, and in particular the case of the 2010 MAK exhibition in Vienna. Rather than conceive of art and art spaces as new arenas for bringing about change into North Korea, I propose viewing these emerging sites that bring new actors, institutions and traditions in contact as intercultural sites for shiftings in sovereign politics through North Korea. My argument is that reinterpretation of North Korean political ideology and ways of reading North Korean art have major implications on re-imagining sovereign relations in post-cold war postcolonial era.
Making Things International 2: Catalysts and Reactions, 2016
"Following ‘North Korea’ as a sign in popular culture shows us how the international is a loose n... more "Following ‘North Korea’ as a sign in popular culture shows us how the international is a loose network of desires, attachments and ambitions that – while located in various geographical, social, cultural and political sites – is an expression of alignment with ‘the top’ of the global hierarchy. This paper asks, what do we gain in our understanding of the global hierarchy when we approach ‘North Korea’ as things in popular culture that might be imperceptible when we only follow ‘North Korea’ as a sign?
Postcolonial and feminist theorists such as Trinh Minh-ha, Sara Ahmed and Rey Chow variously highlight how politics and world-making activities are things, i.e. that they have texture, colour, composition, location, weight, orientation, and feel about them. This paper focuses on greyness of North Korean landscape and art in the international popular imagination to explore grey spaces and times as moments of ‘undone interval’, suspension and in-betweeness in world politics. It examines North Korean objects in photographs, documentary films and internet and illustrates how questions of aesthetics, in particular the immateriality that becomes perceptible through focus on materiality, are vital to our understanding of politics.
"
This paper grapples with the complexity of surviving the perennial relegation to object positions... more This paper grapples with the complexity of surviving the perennial relegation to object positions in international politics and conflicts. It focuses on Bosnia and Korea as sites with complicated histories engendered and kept alive by specific experiences of conflicts and intimate 'post-conflict' entanglements. Through a close reading of Bosnian and Korean films, we illustrate how 'post-conflict' promises of transformation ushered in by declarations that the Cold War had ended create a particular post-conflict politico-affective scene. We term this scene ‘postsocialist’ that makes visible how a myriad of narratives, images, and expressive iterations are resonant longings and orientations towards multiple worlds foreclosed by the triumphalist Post-Cold War imaginary. Interweaving Bosnian and Korean films, we argue that nostalgia and long are dramas of adjustments that create and reconfigure the international. Building upon the work on desire and affect by Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Trinh Minh-ha, the paper proposes a new grammar for imagining, writing, and co-creating the international through a discussion of the case of slowness and being a fool in (post) conflict scenes. Keywords: affect, cinema, conflict, Post-Cold War, the international
In the current international context, North Korea is invariably seen as a problem of poverty, hum... more In the current international context, North Korea is invariably seen as a problem of poverty, human rights and security upon which the international community must act. Framed as such, Korean reunification and reconciliation are seen as desirable developments and compelling reasons for tackling the ‘North Korea problem’. Such framings, however, reduce North Korea to a problem that positions the ‘international’ and ‘South Korea’ as the source of its solutions. The assumption here is that a truer, more stable loving-relation between North and South Korea, and by extension the international, would improve the present situation in North Korea and the problems it poses to the rest of the world. This great optimism can be seen in popular South Korean films such as Shiri and JSA where love is deployed as a powerful agent of change. The argument of this article is that the idea of national reconciliation that intimately attempts to erase divisions and install (a redemptive) unity actually kills the embraced North Korea. To illustrate how alternative responses to North Korea are possible, I consider how love can be ‘a properly political transformative concept’ (Berlant 2011), through a reading of Hwang Sok-young's novel Baridaegi.
Part of the Forum: The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory edited by Aida Hozic, Mil... more Part of the Forum: The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory edited by Aida Hozic, Millennium: Journal of International Studies DOI: 10.1177/0305829816684260
This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by early-career women international relati... more This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by early-career women international relations (IR) scholars in the Asia-Pacific region in their workplaces and beyond. By taking a self-ethnographic perspective, six contributors from five countries provide an engaging overview of difficulties they face in their everyday lives. Against the backdrop of this diverse and globalizing region, the contributors are all academic migrants in search of employment and learning opportunities within the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. They lead migratory lives by frequently crossing ideational and material boundaries to contribute to a more diverse IR knowledge base, and they encounter numerous difficulties and forms of discrimination. This forum has two aims. First, in reflecting on the contributors’ own lived experiences, it highlights the diversity of issues faced by early-career women scholars in this region. Second, it calls for novel, more inclusive forms of solidarity that appreciates...
This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist in... more This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the article explores some of the distinctive insights that are generated about global nuclear politics by a feminist approach that takes coloniality seriously. We show that such an approach reconceptualizes nuclear destruction as a lived reality for many, within a broader history of domination; exposes the racialized, gendered and colonial dimensions of nuclear discourses; and casts fresh light on the material colonial relationships at the heart of the global nuclear order. In the second part, we reverse our focus to critically think through how the c...
This article uses contemporary academic literature on North Korea to illustrate how a mode of eng... more This article uses contemporary academic literature on North Korea to illustrate how a mode of engagement that prioritizes, and thus constitutes, security is at work not only in security and strategic studies but also in various international frameworks that streamline how we approach North Korea. Security is understood in this article as a hierarchic mode of encounter that, through the various cultural resources available to the self, seeks to master over, contain and miniaturize the other. This is not a wholly new argument (when is it ever?) but what is interesting is the locatedness of this argument and how it details the way in which scholarly production of a place like North Korea in the positivist tradition, regardless of their theoretical, political and disciplinary differences, approaches them in a security mode. What is of interest is how a critique of the international that is located and empirically-weighed down makes visible a perspective of the international that remains otherwise unperceived and ignored. This article first illustrates how security as a mode operates in security and strategic studies in the case of North Korea and then goes on to show how this mode prevails in the human rights, economic and humanitarian frameworks that construct North Korea as a rogue and a failed state. The article concertedly argues for a mode of encounter that moves beyond security thinking that highlights the importance of locatedness of critical interventions.
When we see international politics largely as a problem of difference rooted in intersecting hier... more When we see international politics largely as a problem of difference rooted in intersecting hierarchies along gender, race and class axes, ‘international relations’ can be more productively understood as ‘intercultural relations’. From this perspective, dialogue about issues such as security, human rights and development cannot occur without transactions of cultural translation. By framing intercultural encounter as an issue of translation (rather than denial, exclusion, domination or integration), I am referring to the necessary and power laden process of mediation that must accompany any contact between differences. To think through the nature of dialogues and the necessary translation that must occur in intercultural encounters, the paper turns to two graphic novels that recount travel experiences in North Korea. They offer rich visual and textual resources that are particular to the genre in their engagement with North Korea(ns). North Korea as an international problem is especially interesting for the predictable ways it is constructed as a radically threatening and deviant Other.
There is much talk, optimism and innovation in what is variously termed the cultural or aesthetic... more There is much talk, optimism and innovation in what is variously termed the cultural or aesthetic turn in International Relations. Advocates of these turns justify turning to the arts, popular culture and the everyday aesthetics for how they interrupt and help revise the privileged position of governmental agencies and policy-level actions as the main drivers and sites of politics. This paper, however, contends that art, just as policy, governmental and even NGO sites of politics, has a way of conceiving of change or transformation as a top-down process. To consider what turning to art and culture in research on global south entails, the paper juxtaposes the arguments of two postcolonial-feminist thinkers, Gayatri Spivak and Trinh Minh-ha.
A Roundtable Review of Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the K... more A Roundtable Review of Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border
Why do we care and are so easily made to care about North Korea? What do we care about exactly wh... more Why do we care and are so easily made to care about North Korea? What do we care about exactly when we pay attention to places like North Korea? What does our care accomplish? To answer these questions, who 'we' are and how we care about North Korea need as much interrogation as what is going on inside North Korean government, society, economy and imagination. The book explores issues of relations, i.e. how we relate to, stand in relation and establish relationships in and through frameworks of security, human rights, humanitarianism and development. To frame the 'North Korea problem' as a problem of relations is to highlight how shifts away from objectifying North Korean actors and things are possible. In this book, I examine the intercultural dimensions of Western and South Korean encounters with North Korea that have achieved wide circulation among experts and laypersons alike (albeit to different degrees and significance). I examine various popular cultural genres - graphic novels, memoirs, photography, films and novels, but no, I do not talk about the American macho/misogynistic James Bond movie and Team America.
Emerging research on North Korean art mainly reads North Korean art, art theory and art instituti... more Emerging research on North Korean art mainly reads North Korean art, art theory and art institutions for the roles they play in sustaining North Korean authoritarian political system. To counter this trend, I turn to North Korean art and art/political theory to critique the deployment of authoritarianism in international research on North Korea and more fundamentally, to interrogate prevailing conceptions of sovereignty that feed into contemporary international interventionist practices. I begin by problematising the hierarchy in international politics that the authoritarian framework reifies and illustrate how North Korean juche ideology can be read to complicate how sovereign relations work, feel and look in North Korea and beyond. I turn my analytical focus to North Korean paintings that circulate globally, and in particular the case of the 2010 MAK exhibition in Vienna. Rather than conceive of art and art spaces as new arenas for bringing about change into North Korea, I propose viewing these emerging sites that bring new actors, institutions and traditions in contact as intercultural sites for shiftings in sovereign politics through North Korea. My argument is that reinterpretation of North Korean political ideology and ways of reading North Korean art have major implications on re-imagining sovereign relations in post-cold war postcolonial era.
Making Things International 2: Catalysts and Reactions, 2016
"Following ‘North Korea’ as a sign in popular culture shows us how the international is a loose n... more "Following ‘North Korea’ as a sign in popular culture shows us how the international is a loose network of desires, attachments and ambitions that – while located in various geographical, social, cultural and political sites – is an expression of alignment with ‘the top’ of the global hierarchy. This paper asks, what do we gain in our understanding of the global hierarchy when we approach ‘North Korea’ as things in popular culture that might be imperceptible when we only follow ‘North Korea’ as a sign?
Postcolonial and feminist theorists such as Trinh Minh-ha, Sara Ahmed and Rey Chow variously highlight how politics and world-making activities are things, i.e. that they have texture, colour, composition, location, weight, orientation, and feel about them. This paper focuses on greyness of North Korean landscape and art in the international popular imagination to explore grey spaces and times as moments of ‘undone interval’, suspension and in-betweeness in world politics. It examines North Korean objects in photographs, documentary films and internet and illustrates how questions of aesthetics, in particular the immateriality that becomes perceptible through focus on materiality, are vital to our understanding of politics.
"
This paper grapples with the complexity of surviving the perennial relegation to object positions... more This paper grapples with the complexity of surviving the perennial relegation to object positions in international politics and conflicts. It focuses on Bosnia and Korea as sites with complicated histories engendered and kept alive by specific experiences of conflicts and intimate 'post-conflict' entanglements. Through a close reading of Bosnian and Korean films, we illustrate how 'post-conflict' promises of transformation ushered in by declarations that the Cold War had ended create a particular post-conflict politico-affective scene. We term this scene ‘postsocialist’ that makes visible how a myriad of narratives, images, and expressive iterations are resonant longings and orientations towards multiple worlds foreclosed by the triumphalist Post-Cold War imaginary. Interweaving Bosnian and Korean films, we argue that nostalgia and long are dramas of adjustments that create and reconfigure the international. Building upon the work on desire and affect by Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Trinh Minh-ha, the paper proposes a new grammar for imagining, writing, and co-creating the international through a discussion of the case of slowness and being a fool in (post) conflict scenes. Keywords: affect, cinema, conflict, Post-Cold War, the international
In the current international context, North Korea is invariably seen as a problem of poverty, hum... more In the current international context, North Korea is invariably seen as a problem of poverty, human rights and security upon which the international community must act. Framed as such, Korean reunification and reconciliation are seen as desirable developments and compelling reasons for tackling the ‘North Korea problem’. Such framings, however, reduce North Korea to a problem that positions the ‘international’ and ‘South Korea’ as the source of its solutions. The assumption here is that a truer, more stable loving-relation between North and South Korea, and by extension the international, would improve the present situation in North Korea and the problems it poses to the rest of the world. This great optimism can be seen in popular South Korean films such as Shiri and JSA where love is deployed as a powerful agent of change. The argument of this article is that the idea of national reconciliation that intimately attempts to erase divisions and install (a redemptive) unity actually kills the embraced North Korea. To illustrate how alternative responses to North Korea are possible, I consider how love can be ‘a properly political transformative concept’ (Berlant 2011), through a reading of Hwang Sok-young's novel Baridaegi.
Part of the Forum: The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory edited by Aida Hozic, Mil... more Part of the Forum: The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory edited by Aida Hozic, Millennium: Journal of International Studies DOI: 10.1177/0305829816684260
This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by early-career women international relati... more This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by early-career women international relations (IR) scholars in the Asia-Pacific region in their workplaces and beyond. By taking a self-ethnographic perspective, six contributors from five countries provide an engaging overview of difficulties they face in their everyday lives. Against the backdrop of this diverse and globalizing region, the contributors are all academic migrants in search of employment and learning opportunities within the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. They lead migratory lives by frequently crossing ideational and material boundaries to contribute to a more diverse IR knowledge base, and they encounter numerous difficulties and forms of discrimination. This forum has two aims. First, in reflecting on the contributors’ own lived experiences, it highlights the diversity of issues faced by early-career women scholars in this region. Second, it calls for novel, more inclusive forms of solidarity that appreciates...
This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist in... more This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the article explores some of the distinctive insights that are generated about global nuclear politics by a feminist approach that takes coloniality seriously. We show that such an approach reconceptualizes nuclear destruction as a lived reality for many, within a broader history of domination; exposes the racialized, gendered and colonial dimensions of nuclear discourses; and casts fresh light on the material colonial relationships at the heart of the global nuclear order. In the second part, we reverse our focus to critically think through how the c...
This article uses contemporary academic literature on North Korea to illustrate how a mode of eng... more This article uses contemporary academic literature on North Korea to illustrate how a mode of engagement that prioritizes, and thus constitutes, security is at work not only in security and strategic studies but also in various international frameworks that streamline how we approach North Korea. Security is understood in this article as a hierarchic mode of encounter that, through the various cultural resources available to the self, seeks to master over, contain and miniaturize the other. This is not a wholly new argument (when is it ever?) but what is interesting is the locatedness of this argument and how it details the way in which scholarly production of a place like North Korea in the positivist tradition, regardless of their theoretical, political and disciplinary differences, approaches them in a security mode. What is of interest is how a critique of the international that is located and empirically-weighed down makes visible a perspective of the international that remains otherwise unperceived and ignored. This article first illustrates how security as a mode operates in security and strategic studies in the case of North Korea and then goes on to show how this mode prevails in the human rights, economic and humanitarian frameworks that construct North Korea as a rogue and a failed state. The article concertedly argues for a mode of encounter that moves beyond security thinking that highlights the importance of locatedness of critical interventions.
When we see international politics largely as a problem of difference rooted in intersecting hier... more When we see international politics largely as a problem of difference rooted in intersecting hierarchies along gender, race and class axes, ‘international relations’ can be more productively understood as ‘intercultural relations’. From this perspective, dialogue about issues such as security, human rights and development cannot occur without transactions of cultural translation. By framing intercultural encounter as an issue of translation (rather than denial, exclusion, domination or integration), I am referring to the necessary and power laden process of mediation that must accompany any contact between differences. To think through the nature of dialogues and the necessary translation that must occur in intercultural encounters, the paper turns to two graphic novels that recount travel experiences in North Korea. They offer rich visual and textual resources that are particular to the genre in their engagement with North Korea(ns). North Korea as an international problem is especially interesting for the predictable ways it is constructed as a radically threatening and deviant Other.
There is much talk, optimism and innovation in what is variously termed the cultural or aesthetic... more There is much talk, optimism and innovation in what is variously termed the cultural or aesthetic turn in International Relations. Advocates of these turns justify turning to the arts, popular culture and the everyday aesthetics for how they interrupt and help revise the privileged position of governmental agencies and policy-level actions as the main drivers and sites of politics. This paper, however, contends that art, just as policy, governmental and even NGO sites of politics, has a way of conceiving of change or transformation as a top-down process. To consider what turning to art and culture in research on global south entails, the paper juxtaposes the arguments of two postcolonial-feminist thinkers, Gayatri Spivak and Trinh Minh-ha.
A Roundtable Review of Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the K... more A Roundtable Review of Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border
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Postcolonial and feminist theorists such as Trinh Minh-ha, Sara Ahmed and Rey Chow variously highlight how politics and world-making activities are things, i.e. that they have texture, colour, composition, location, weight, orientation, and feel about them. This paper focuses on greyness of North Korean landscape and art in the international popular imagination to explore grey spaces and times as moments of ‘undone interval’, suspension and in-betweeness in world politics. It examines North Korean objects in photographs, documentary films and internet and illustrates how questions of aesthetics, in particular the immateriality that becomes perceptible through focus on materiality, are vital to our understanding of politics.
"
Keywords: affect, cinema, conflict, Post-Cold War, the international
Postcolonial and feminist theorists such as Trinh Minh-ha, Sara Ahmed and Rey Chow variously highlight how politics and world-making activities are things, i.e. that they have texture, colour, composition, location, weight, orientation, and feel about them. This paper focuses on greyness of North Korean landscape and art in the international popular imagination to explore grey spaces and times as moments of ‘undone interval’, suspension and in-betweeness in world politics. It examines North Korean objects in photographs, documentary films and internet and illustrates how questions of aesthetics, in particular the immateriality that becomes perceptible through focus on materiality, are vital to our understanding of politics.
"
Keywords: affect, cinema, conflict, Post-Cold War, the international