Postdoctoral fellowship opportunity at ANU

Here's a good opportunity to do some postdoctoral research in Canberra:
The Korea Institute, Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific, is offering a two-year research fellowship focusing on any one of three possible fields of investigation: 1) the politics of Korea, with a focus on contemporary developments; 2) the economics of Korea including Korea’s global involvement in multilateral issues; or 3) the security of the Korean peninsula with an East Asia context.

The successful applicant will be eligible for a salary package of $53,935 to $68,413 pa, plus 17% superannuation. The closing date for applications is 1 October 2009.

For further details of the position and how apply, please refer to the following page: http://jobs.anu.edu.au/PositionDetail.aspx?p=823

Korean evangelicals in Afghanistan

Friend Ju Hui Judy Han is giving a talk this month at UC Berkeley about her work on Korean evangelicals and the politics of secularity.

You might know her from her fabulous graphic representation of key dissertation ideas in the form of humorous comics that I absolutely adore. Maybe everyone doing a dissertation should attempt to distill the ideas in the form of a comic... I'm thinking about it...

**please post widely**

Please join us for the following important critical perspective:

Ju Hui Judy Han (Geography, UC Berkeley)
"Missions Without Missionaries?: Politics of Secularity in the Case of Korean Evangelicals in Afghanistan"

Thursday, March 13, 2008
4 p.m.
Barbara Christian Room, 554 Barrows Hall

A group of twenty-three South Korean evangelicals made worldwide headlines in 2007 when they were taken hostage by the Taliban for nearly six weeks in Afghanistan. While critics pointed to the hostage situation as indicative of misguided missionary zeal and recklessness, mission advocates continued to claim that the hostages should be described as “church volunteers” or “humanitarian aid workers.” The insistence on avoiding the term “evangelical missionaries” certainly reflects the precarious nature of proselytizing illegally and the obvious need for secrecy in clandestine operations. But claims of secularity also arise out of mission strategies that espouse voluntarism and humanitarianism over conspicuous evangelism and conversion—an important feature of the new evangelical internationalism. Drawing from field research of “Islam missions” and “frontier missions,” this talk discusses how Korean/American missionaries reconcile notions of secularity and religiosity in the global capitalist-evangelical assemblage.

Ju Hui Judy Han is a PhD candidate in geography with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation concerns the politics of evangelism and subject-formation, and how contemporary Korean/American missions both support and subvert existing racial, gender, and geopolitical hierarchies associated with colonial missions and US hegemony.

Open to the public. Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Center for Korean Studies, and the Asian Cultural Studies Working Group. For further information, contact Christine Hong (cjhong@berkeley.edu).

Start off the New Year right...

...with some reading from Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, published by SAGE.

Dal Yong Jin and I have an article published in the latest issue of Games and Culture (2008, Vol.3 Issue 1, pp. 38-58) titled, "Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry."

The table of contents along with access to the text can be found here at the Sage Journals Online website: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/vol3/issue1/

Alongside articles that take up games in the Asia-Pacific, our paper is a combination of political economy and ethnography from our research on Korean online games.

Abstract: In this article, the authors attempt to ascertain the factors involved in the swift growth of online games in the context of broader sociocultural elements. Through political economy and ethnographic analysis, they show that online games, like other forms of technology, are sociocultural products that have been historically constituted by certain forms of knowledge and social practice. First, they map out the forces driving their development by examining government policies and competition among online games companies in Korea. They then explore capital flow to investigate the major players in the market. Finally, they explore the sociocultural elements contributing to the diffusion of online games in the cultural milieu specific to Korea.

Key Words: ethnography • Korea • online games • policy • political economy

Happy New Year all, and happy reading! All accusations of geeking out apply.