Cultural Discourses About Immigration, Mothering, and Disability in Korea: An Ethnographic Interview Study

This paper investigates ableism in the context of marriage-labor immigration in Korea, as demonstrated in the circulating discourses about mothering, cultural others, and deficits. I use examples from ethnographic interviews to underline the deficit perspective prevalent in Korean society, associating marriage-labor immigrant families with insufficiency, inferiority, and disability

Racialized Language and Social Complexity: The Multilayered Plurilingual Lives of Filipina Migrants in South Korea

Over the past two decades, South Korea has witnessed substantial demographic shifts, and especially so as a result of a rapid increase in the number of marriage migrants to the country. Focusing on the ethnographic interview accounts of Filipina migrants in Korea, the authors investigate how the performative quality of accented speech in English both enables and constrains migrant women as they attempt to navigate and negotiate power dynamics within families, social relationships, and workplaces, as well as fashion a locally contextualized sense of identity. The following research questions guide this inquiry: How do perceptions of English language and accent performance enable and constrain the social mobility and integration of Filipina marriage migrants in South Korean society? What is the relationship between English accent and racialization in contemporary Korean society as demonstrated in Filipina migrant experiences? Within the Korean context, marriage migrants from Southeast Asian countries are frequently marginalized as cultural and linguistic minorities. However, Filipina migrants’ familiarity with English adds much complexity and nuance to their circumstances and experiences. Through a broadly Bourdieuian-inspired theoretical approach, the authors examine the variegated roles the English language plays in the lives of Filipina migrants and the ways in which Filipina migrants, in turn, grapple with the nuanced racialized implications of their language skills within the larger context of social mobility and integration

Rapid, Phase-free Detection of Long Identity-by-Descent Segments Enables Effective Relationship Classification

Identity-by-descent (IBD) segments are a useful tool for applications ranging from demographic inference to relationship classification, but most detection methods rely on phasing information and therefore require substantial computation time. As genetic datasets grow, methods for inferring IBD segments that scale well will be critical. We developed IBIS, an IBD detector that locates long regions of allele sharing between unphased individuals, and benchmarked it with Refined IBD, GERMLINE, and TRUFFLE on 3,000 simulated individuals. Phasing these with Beagle 5 takes 4.3 CPU days, followed by either Refined IBD or GERMLINE segment detection in 2.9 or 1.1 h, respectively. By comparison, IBIS finishes in 6.8 min or 7.8 min with IBD2 functionality enabled: speedups of 805–946× including phasing time. TRUFFLE takes 2.6 h, corresponding to IBIS speedups of 20.2–23.3×. IBIS is also accurate, inferring ≥7 cM IBD segments at quality comparable to Refined IBD and GERMLINE. With these segments, IBIS classifies first through third degree relatives in real Mexican American samples at rates meeting or exceeding other methods tested and identifies fourth through sixth degree pairs at rates within 0.0%–2.0% of the top method. While allele frequency-based approaches that do not detect segments can infer relationship degrees faster than IBIS, the fastest are biased in admixed samples, with KING inferring 30.8% fewer fifth degree Mexican American relatives correctly compared with IBIS. Finally, we ran IBIS on chromosome 2 of the UK Biobank dataset and estimate its runtime on the autosomes to be 3.3 days parallelized across 128 cores