Figures of personhood

Conceptualizing Linguistic Difference: Perspectives from Linguistic Anthropolog

The powers in PowerPoint: Embedded authorities, documentary tastes, and institutional (second) orders in corporate Korea

Microsoft PowerPoint is both the bane and banality of contemporary South Korean office work. Corporate workers spend countless hours refining and crafting plans, proposals, and reports in PowerPoint that often lead to conflicts with coworkers and overtime work. This article theorizes the excessive attention to documents in modern office contexts. Where scholars have been under the impression that institutional documents align with institutional purposes, I describe a context in which making documents for individual purposes and making them for work exist under a basic tension. Based on fieldwork in corporate Korea between 2013 and 2015, I describe how Korean office workers calibrate documents to the tastes of superiors who populate the managerial chain. These practices leave little trace of real "work" on paper, but they are productive for navigating complex internal labor markets and demonstrating a higher order value of attention toward others. These findings suggest that institutional and individual authorities are not competing projects inside organizations but become entangled in increasingly complex participatory encounters, even as they are channeled through a seemingly simple software like PowerPoint. [documents, expertise, authority, technology, South Korea

Foreign language education at the nexus of neoliberalism and coloniality: subjectivity in South Korean discourses of education reform

Critical Inquiry in Language Studies194336-35

Mediatizing neoliberalism: The discursive construction of education’s 'future'

10.1080/14708477.2018.1501843Language and Intercultural Communication185478-48

Foreign language education at the nexus of neoliberalism and coloniality: subjectivity in South Korean discourses of education reform

Critical Inquiry in Language Studies194336-35

Foreign language education at the nexus of neoliberalism and coloniality: subjectivity in South Korean discourses of education reform

10.1080/15427587.2022.2086553Critical Inquiry in Language Studies194336-35

Space and Language Learning under the Neoliberal Economy

Neoliberalism, as an ideology that valorizes and institutionalizes market-based freedom and individual entrepreneurship, derives from the logic of highly advanced capitalism, and thus must be understood in relation to the material conditions of our capitalist economy. One such material condition is space. However, the intersection of space and neoliberalism is yet to be explored in detail within the field of applied linguistics. This lacuna impedes our understanding of the social and geographical embeddedness of language, in particular the dialectic between language learning and political economy. The key question we address in this paper is: how are trajectories of language learning under the neoliberal economy shaped in spatial terms? Through looking at two cases—the re-invention of the countryside village of Yangshuo as the biggest English corner in China and the Korean phenomena of jogi yuhak [early study abroad]—we argue 1) that a heightened awareness of the link between language learning, space, and mobility will allow us to explore the material constraints and inequalities of language learning with greater sensitivity, and 2) that a focus on the spatial grounding of language learning can allow applied linguistics to make a unique contribution to the critique of neoliberalism

Becoming Global Elites Through Transnational Language Learning?: The Case of Korean Early Study Abroad in Singapore

Since the late 1990s, early study abroad (ESA) in English-speaking countries has been a popular educational strategy for pre-university Korean students to acquire important language skills such as global English, which is imagined to help them prepare for the competition in global educational and occupational market. However, as ESA, commonly known as jogi yuhak, became a prominent educational strategy among Korean middle class Korean, the destination for Korean Study Abroad began to diversify, showing significant increase of Korean Study Abroad in non-Western countries. For instance, Singapore has emerged as a new site for ESA, due to its multilingual environment which facilitates the learning of global language of English as well as additional languages such as Mandarin. What, then, are the implications of such diversification of ESA for the goals of and beliefs about study abroad? This paper aims to answer this question by examining the language learning practices and ideologies for three Korean ESA families in Singapore, based on participant observation and interview data drawn from a 2.5-year ethnographic study.The parents we studied anticipated that the multilingual competence gained in Singapore, including that of English, Mandarin, and Korean, will lead their children to become truly global elites. For them, Singapore's multilingualism facilitates acquisition of linguistic resources valued in the global market, providing the children with global flexibility and enabling them to freely cross linguistic as well as national boundaries for further success. Yet, they also raised questions about the possibilities of achieving such global and flexible identities as they face various material and social constraints in study abroad. We analyze such investments in language learning in terms of the shifting ways and tensions of how language is conceptualized in the global economy (Heller 2007), particularly how linguistic diversity comes to be understood as measurable value, rather than a socially grounded condition of language use (Urciuoli 2015). Based on this discussion, we consider how the diversification of ESA gets incorporated into discourse of symbolic and cultural capital accumulation despite the opportunities such diversification opens up for greater intercultural understanding.