Friday, March 26, 2021 | 6PM to 8PM
This study by Dr. Sujung Kim interrogates working-class Korean immigrant students’ sense of social belonging and their strategies to advocate their social membership, focusing on working-class 1.5 generation Korean American students at Station Community College (SCC), a public community college in Chicago. These immigrant community college students are part of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) generation, who have directly and indirectly witnessed and experienced the devastating impact of neoliberal reforms by the IMF during the 1997 and 2008 financial crises in Korea on people’s ordinary lives, and the political-economic situational impacts on their families’ migration to the United States. This study proposes that these working-class Korean immigrant community college students’ navigation of their belonging is shaped by the dialectical mechanisms between various macro- and micro-level of political-economic, social, cultural and educational components.
