and relations of Korea and the U.S. to make sense of our transnational localities. It also examines how each of us has strategically and ambivalently explored a ...
ABSTRACT
This is a critical auto/ethnography of traveling women of Korean descent in U.S. higher education. Our collective tales are generated between the names that each traveling woman utilizes to assert her subjectivities and the names that prescribe her subjective positions in-between the repertoires of Korea and the U.S. At this imagined and embodied site of "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," the study traces how we have been navigating multivalently narrated histories, cultural forms, and relations of Korea and the U.S. to make sense of our transnational localities. It also examines how each of us has strategically and ambivalently explored a traveling self through (un)intentional distancing, rejecting, merging and adopting the signs, practices and institutions of Korea and/or America, to free ourselves and to rework the worlds we are living in. To make an observation of our historicity, I utilize the problematics and possibilities of the Metropolis/First and Colonized/Third World paradigm. Within the framework, I put together four distinct literatures: (1) foreign students in U.S. higher education; (2) history of migration between Korea and the U.S.; (3) the cultural politics of Asian/immigrants/Americans; and (4) the construction of Korean women in Korean nationalist cultural discourse. By weaving these literatures, I plot multiple routes that ii
connect the different geographies, cultures, languages and politics in order to display how the term, "traveling korean women in U.S. higher education," becomes imaginable for the study. In this way, the study attempts to draw connections and blur the distinctions between foreign student discourse, minority and majority politics in the U.S., and First and Third World inequalities. "Decolonizing methodology" guides the methods and procedures for the study. Within the paradigm, I discuss the rhizomatic nature of the auto/ethnography that opens up the research field, the distance between the researcher and the researched, and the beginning and ending of the project. Our tales recount different reasons and modes of our travels - temporary migration, immigration, emigration, adoption, returning, fleeing, constant shuttling, and/or living in both. Yet, I analyze how our traveling narratives are bound together by the fact that all of us are "stuck" in-between the recalcitrant signs of Korea and the U.S. where we share the predicaments of racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism and/or subordination. In this oxymoron space of stuck traveling, I examine our prolific acts of owning and disowning to make the best out of the circumstances, which create a new possibility for others to "cross paths with it or retrace it." The study also discusses how the global/multicultural discourse of U.S. higher education interacts with our narratives. This demands of educators to ask and to think differently about the place of U.S. higher education in global/local societies. Finally, I address how this project both confirms and destabilizes our "not unified collectivities." The dissertation ends with a discussion on the possibilities of "collective narratives of heterogeneities " in traveling worlds. iii
