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.

ISBN-13: 9781978831384

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Publication Date: 07-14-2023

Pages: 222

Product Dimensions: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.60d

Series: Rutgers Childhood Studies

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.