Digital Media, Online Activism, and Social Movements in Korea deepens the current understanding of online activism and its impacts on society by highlighting how various forms of social movements have been mobilized in Korea. Through exploring movements in Korea such as political participation based on SNS, the 2008 U.S. beef protests, and the 2016-2017 candlelight vigils, the contributors study the intersection of digital media platforms, current trends, and social, cultural, and political conditions within Korean society. Using a wide range of events and movements, this book analyzes how people have utilized the development of digital media to facilitate social movements and effect social change.

​Igniting the Internet is one of the first books to examine in depth the development and consequences of Internet-born politics in the twenty-first century. It takes up the new wave of South Korean youth activism that originated online in 2002, when the country’s dynamic cyberspace transformed a vehicular accident involving two U.S. servicemen into a national furor that compelled many Koreans to reexamine the fifty-year relationship between the two countries. Responding to the accident, which ended in the deaths of two high school students, technologically savvy youth went online to organize demonstrations that grew into nightly rallies across the nation. Internet-born, youth-driven mass protest has since become a familiar and effective repertoire for activism in South Korea, even as the rest of the world has struggled to find its feet with this emerging model of political involvement. Igniting the Internet focuses on the cultural dynamics that have allowed the Internet to bring issues rapidly to public attention and exert influence on both domestic and international politics. The author combines a robust analysis of online communities with nuanced interview data to theorize a “cultural ignition process”—the mechanisms and implications for popular politics in volatile Internet-driven activism—in South Korea and beyond. She offers a unique perspective on how local actors experience and remember the cultural dynamics of Internet-born activism and how these experiences shape the political identities of a generation who has essentially come of age in cyberspace, the so-called digital natives or millennials. South Korea’s debates on the nature of youth-driven Internet protest reverberated around the world following the events in Tahrir Square in 2010 and Zuccotti Park in 2011. Igniting the Internetoffers numerous points of comparison with countries following a path of technological development and urban youth formation similar to that of South Korea with a thorough consideration of general structural changes and locally specific triggers for Internet activism. Readers interested in social movement theory and new media in social context as well as students and scholars of Korean studies will find the work both far-reaching and insightful.

Through a critical examination of the Korean diaspora in transnational contexts as a case study, Korean Digital Diaspora: Transnational Social Movements and Diaspora Identity unmasks the process of how people of the diaspora have built social interactions and communication with others online, how they have orchestrated social movements, and finally, how they have narrated and reshaped their diaspora identities in their everyday lives. Utilizing an ethnographical approach, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and a field study in New York City and Philadelphia, Hojeong Lee delineates how digital media technology has expanded into a new form of diaspora, digital diaspora, within the Korean diaspora community, and how it has mobilized the social movements of Korean diaspora members. Accordingly, Korean diaspora members have begun to imagine their community as a transnational global diaspora. Korean Digital Diaspora concludes with an analysis of how the changed attitudes of diaspora members have also influenced how they define themselves and how they are reshaping their diaspora identities. This multi-site, three-year study reveals the nexus of media, individuals, and society, highlighting the transnational social movements of diaspora members.

Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands "global" as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature—the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory—as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a wide-ranging corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East and South Asia, parts of Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, and Western Africa. The book’s contributors adopt an array of interpretive approaches to make visible new connections and possibilities engendered by cross-cultural encounters. Among other topics, they reflect on the shifting conditions for production and distribution of literature, participatory cultures and technological affordances of Web 2.0, the ever-changing dynamics of global and local forces, and fundamental questions, such as, "What do we mean when we talk about literature today?" and "What is the future of literature?"

Where we have been and where we are headed -- The look and feel of e-tactics and their Web sites -- Tacking action on the cheap: costs and participation -- Making action on the cheap: costs and organizing -- Being together versus working together : copresence in participation -- From power in numbers to power laws: copresence in organizing -- A new digital repertoire of contention?

The growing importance of the Korean economy in the global arena and the spread of the so-called 'Korean wave' in Asia mean there is an increasing desire to understand contemporary Korean Society. To this end, this book provides a critical and progressive analysis of the diverse issues that impact on and shape contemporary Korean society at both local and national levels. The contributors address issues and movements which include: The state and regime Human rights Gender Civil society and social movements Culture Religion Domestic and migrant labour Welfare The chapters in this volume provide a critical perspective on Korean society, and draw upon interdisciplinary research from across the social sciences. With contributions from leading Korean scholars and academics from around the world, this is a welcome addition to the growing field of Korean Studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in Korean studies, Korean and Asian culture and society, and Asian studies more generally.

Korean Wild Geese Families: Gender, Family, Social, and Legal Dynamics of Middle-Class Asian Transnational Families in North America explores the experiences of middle-class Korean transnational families, whose mothers and children migrate abroad for children’s education while fathers remain in Korea and economically support their families, throughout transnational separation: before separation, during separation, and after reunification. It discusses the themes of (1) changes in wild geese parents’ relative gender statuses, housework patterns, and spousal relationships; (2) changes in mothering/fathering practices and intergenerational relationships; and (3) wild geese families’ settlement and integration in the host societies and re-adaptation to Korea after family reunification. Se Hwa Lee interviewed mothers in both the United States and Canada, as well as fathers in Korea, to compare the effects of immigration policies between the two countries in North America and present gender-balanced explanations. Se Hwa Lee also sheds light on Asian documented immigrants’ hardships and different degrees of empowerment and incorporation in the host societies according to legal status, employment, additional education, and co-ethnic community membership. This book offers readers valuable venues to enhance their understanding of increasingly diverse transnational families in North America.