Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: politics, policy and practice at national, regional and school levels

In the past decade, South Korea has positioned itself as a global leader in Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and is actively engaged in the international policy process. In this context of state-led GCED, regional- and school-level initiatives to promote GCED have also emerged. One of such attempts is the GCED Policy School introduced by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE); both GCED Policy Schools and SMOE serve as the main sites of inquiry for this study. Qualitative studies on GCED have been thus far heavily dominated by Western-oriented perspectives and case studies and have often lacked a holistic and comprehensive approach for involving both policy makers and practitioners. In order to address this gap, this qualitative study analyzes documents and interviews collected from SMOE and seven GCED Policy Schools in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, through a constructivist interpretive paradigm. By engaging with multiple levels of stakeholders, this study aims to answer the following Research Questions: 1) Why did the SMOE introduce GCED as a key policy area? 2) How is GCED conceptualized in the policy? 3) How are global citizenship and GCED perceived and practiced by different practitioners at the school level (i.e., school leaders, teachers and students)? 4) What are the professional, material and external contexts that influence implementers’ perceptions and practices? In addressing these questions, two theoretical heuristics are used for analysis and have led to key findings. First, the GCED conceptual framework presents four different approaches to GCED (i.e., neoliberal, tourist, humanitarian and critical); the findings suggest that the tourist and humanitarian models of GCED are more predominant than others in regional-level policy and in school practices of GCED. Second, this study also draws on Stephen Ball’s policy cycle and demonstrates that the policy formation and the school-level implementation of GCED is neither linear nor straightforward but a consistent process of political compromises and recontextualization

Role of ambulatory care utilization in accounting for higher inpatient acute myocardial infarction mortality among Asian Americans

INTRODUCTION: To address a lack of population-level studies that examine the association between ambulatory care utilization and cardiovascular outcomes among Asian Americans, this study examined 1) ambulatory care utilization among different racial/ethnic groups and 2) the association between ambulatory care utilization and cardiovascular outcomes. METHOD: This was a retrospective analysis of 2009–2012 Medicare fee-for-service data. Primary outcomes were 1) hospitalization for angina, an ambulatory care sensitive condition, and 2) inpatient AMI mortality. Intermediate outcomes of interest were ambulatory care utilization. First, a descriptive analysis of patients’ predisposing and enabling factors was performed, and then bivariate association between these predisposing and enabling factors and ambulatory care utilization was examined. Lastly, using multivariate logistic regression models I estimated the association between ambulatory care utilization and cardiovascular outcomes, adjusting for socio-demographic and geographical characteristics. RESULTS: There were 999,999 people in the analytic sample, drawn from 21.6 million Medicare fee-for-service enrollees. In 2009, there were significant differences in racial/ethnic ambulatory care utilization. Significantly lower percentage of Asians had frequent ambulatory care visits (>30 visits) and outpatient cardiology clinic visits (>30 visits) (both p-values<0.01), after adjusting for predisposing and enabling factors. Asians had the highest observed inpatient mortality (15.9%) and low ambulatory utilization was associated with increased odds (OR=1.85 [1.11–3.08]) of inpatient AMI mortality. CONCLUSION: Among Medicare fee-for-service enrollees, Asians had fewer ambulatory clinic visits. Low ambulatory care utilization was associated with increased odds of AMI mortality. Further research is needed to understand the causal relationship between ambulatory care utilization and cardiovascular outcomes.2018-11-08T00:00:00

The Politics of Survival and Care in Homeless Japan.

This study explores the politics of survival and care in postindustrial Japan. It draws on archival and ethnographic data gathered during eighteen months of fieldwork between 2009 to 2014 in Kotobuki district, once the nation’s third largest yoseba (day laborers’ quarter) in Yokohama City. I begin with tracking the formation of Kotobuki as an urban underclass neighborhood and its transformation after mob killings of the homeless in its vicinity in the early 1980s. Central to this process was the reconstruction of urban underclass men as the homeless, i.e., elderly relationless men, whose chances of survival were threatened by their isolation. Framed as a struggle to secure the right to survival vis-à-vis the state, the homeless activism in Kotobuki focused on creating relations that could endure the vagaries of welfare policies, changing compositions of the homeless and their supporters, and the constant threat of unexpected death. This study highlights the temporal structure of daily life (seikatsu) underlying social relations and boundaries in Japan Discussing the incorporation of care relations into the politics of survival. In Kotobuki, a variety of reciprocal exchanges of care as diverse as soup kitchens, AA meetings, and medication regimes became tactics of survival embodying the rhythm of life and the will to live. Meanwhile, the temporal orientation toward social subversion, which had once dominated the district, was reconfigured into circulatory rhythms of survival through narrative events where the homeless and their supporters became attuned to each other’s horizons. For the Kotobuki homeless today, survival involves their incorporation into the circulation of care as both receivers and givers beyond the boundary of life and death. This study provides conceptual tools to enrich the study of the state and social exclusion. While the scholarship on the political economy of welfare tends to prioritize the relationship between the state and individual subjects, this study focuses on how individual subjects are made governable through the socioeconomic pressures on concrete relations of care and how everyday struggles for survival involve tackling the logic of these relations.PHDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113543/1/jinikim_1.pd

Cheating in online gaming spreads through observation and victimization

Antisocial behavior can be contagious, spreading from individual to individual and rippling through social networks. Moreover, it can spread not only through third-party influence from observation, just like innovations or individual behavior do, but also through direct experience, via “pay-it-forward” retaliation. Here, we distinguish between the effects of observation and victimization for the contagion of antisocial behavior by analyzing large-scale digital trace data. We study the spread of cheating in more than a million matches of an online multiplayer first-person shooter game, in which up to 100 players compete individually or in teams against strangers. We identify event sequences in which a player who observes or is killed by a certain number of cheaters starts cheating and evaluate the extent to which these sequences would appear if we preserve the team and interaction structure but assume alternative gameplay scenarios. The results reveal that social contagion is only likely to exist for those who both observe and experience cheating, suggesting that third-party influence and “pay-it-forward” reciprocity interact positively. In addition, the effect is present only for those who both observe and experience more than once, suggesting that cheating is more likely to spread after repeated or multi-source exposure. Approaching online games as models of social systems, we use the findings to discuss strategies for targeted interventions to stem the spread of cheating and antisocial behavior more generally in online communities, schools, organizations, and sports

New Literacy Practices of a Kiregi Mother from a(n) (Im)migrant South Korean Family in Canada

The purpose of this study was to explore one South Korean (hereafter Korean) mother’s literacy practices after she had migrated to Canada for the purpose of overseeing her children’s education. Using a case study method, we focused on language, media, domains, and purposes of literacy practices in Korea and Canada. Data were obtained through two semi-structured interviews, two home visit observations, a questionnaire, and collection of literacy artifacts. The documented changes in the mother’s literacy practices, along with the theoretical and methodological approaches used to document them, offer promising areas and approaches for future research about the out-of-school literacy practices of (im)migrant students

How a good sleep predicts life satisfaction: The role of zero-sum beliefs about happiness

Sleep, although a vital aspect of human functioning, has received scant attention in happiness research. This research examines the effect of sleep quality on life satisfaction, and one possible mechanism that bridges the two. One cognitive factor that might tie the relationship between sleep and life satisfaction is a belief about the (in) finite nature of happiness (zero-sum belief about happiness; ZBH), a mindset that occurs more under conditions of scarcity. Given the interconnections among experiences prompted by various types of scarcity (e.g., financial and calorie), we predicted that deprived cognitive resource caused by poor sleep may activate the ZBH, thereby hurting one’s life satisfaction. As expected, we found that sleep quality predicted the participants’ life satisfaction, even controlling for baseline variables. More importantly, this relationship was partially mediated by ZBH. This study opens interesting questions on a relatively unexamined role of non-social predictors, such as sleep, in well-being.11Yssciscopu

Association of Polymorphisms in Browzine Journal Cover Fshr, inha, Esr1, and Bmp15 With Recurrent Implantation Failure

Recurrent implantation failure (RIF) refers to two or more unsuccessful in vitro fertilization embryo transfers in the same individual. Embryonic characteristics, immunological factors, and coagulation factors are known to be the causes of RIF. Genetic factors have also been reported to be involved in the occurrence of RIF, and some single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) may contribute to RIF. We examined SNPs i

Architecting Social Internet of Things

In the new era of the Internet of Things (IoT), most of the devices we interact with daily are connected to the Internet. From tiny sensors, lamps, home appliances, home security systems and health-care devices, to complex heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems at home, myriad devices have network connectivity and provide smart applications. The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is a new paradigm where IoT merges with social networks, allowing people and connected devices as well as the devices themselves to interact within a social network framework to support a new social navigation. Smart homes is one of the domains that can fully leverage this new paradigm, which will enable people and devices, even in different homes, to actively and mostly automatically collaborate to discover and share new information and services. Unfortunately the heterogeneous nature of the devices around the home prohibits seamless communication in the (S)IoT. Furthermore, the state-of-the-art solutions in smart homes offer little, if any, support for collaborating users and devices. This dissertation describes a new, scalable approach to connect, interact and share useful information through devices and users with common interests. The dissertation has three contributions. First, it proposes a holistic and extensible smart home gateway architecture that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous protocol-- and vendor-- specific devices and services and provides fine-grained access controls. Second, it defines an interoperable, scalable and extensible software architecture for a novel cloud-based collaboration framework for a large number of devices and users in many different smart homes. Third, it provides a reasoning framework to enable automated decisions based on the discovered information and knowledge created and shared by end users. The developed architecture and solutions are implemented in real systems, which integrate with many different devices from different manufacturers and run multiple categories of rules created by end users. The architectural evaluation results show the developed systems are interoperable, scalable and extensible