Between Self and Community: Children's Personhood in a Globalized South Korea

Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it shows how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of what makes "a good child" amid Korea's shifting educational and social contexts. Junehui Ahn details the conflicting and competing ways in which the ideologies of new personhood are enacted in actual everyday socialization contexts and reveals the confusions, dilemmas, and ruptures that occur when globally dominant ideals of childhood development are superimposed onto local experiences. Between Self and Community pays special attention to the way children, as active agents of socialization, create, construe, and sustain their own meanings of their personhood, thereby highlighting the dynamism children and their culturally rich peer world create in South Korea's shifting socialization terrain.

Author: Junehui Ahn
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 07/14/2023
Pages: 222
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9781978831384
ISBN10: 1978831382
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Children's Studies
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | Asian Studies
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social

About the Author
Junehui Ahn is a professor of urban sociology at the University of Seoul in South Korea. She is the coauthor of Advertisement and Cultural History of Beauty in Korea.