KJC Korea
Journal Central

Korean academia has sought to secure its own uniqueness differentiating it from global academia. Despite the constant debate over the academic dependency of non-Western scholars on Western academia, there has been little substantive evidence showing whether Korean academia is subordinate to global academia or whether it has developed its own distinctive knowledge discourses. Analysis of this topic is particularly important because the current university evaluation system often provides strong incentives for scholars to publish in journals indexed in the SSCI. If Korean academia features distinctive knowledge structures compared to international academia, then the emphasis on producing SSCI publications may actually be undermining the uniqueness of Korean academia by incentivizing Korean scholars to follow international trends. By analyzing all published research articles in the field of sociology collected from both KCI and SSCI-indexed journals between 2011 and 2018, we compare the similarities and differences of the knowledge discourse structures of Korean and international sociology, focusing on three key points: shared terms, topic distribution, and networks of topics. Our results show that Korean and international academia share rather few academic terms, that there are distinct differences in the topics of interest between KCI and SSCI. Also, our results demonstrate that Korean sociology produces knowledge discourses in response to the changing needs of Korean society, and that Korean academia connects topics in different ways than international academia. In light of these findings, we discuss the role of scholars and scholarship with respect to the development of Korean academia.

This study examines political and psychological effects of ambivalent sexism. The effects of sexism, which is different from biological sex and sociological gender, are witnessed in political areas beyond psychological and sociological areas. By conducting an experimental survey, we analyze how ambivalent sexism affects Korean voters' political attitudes when gender issues are salient in election campaigns. Our findings present that hostile and benevolent sexism have similar political effects even though they show different emotional reactions. Specifically, while hostile sexism reacts to sexist political elites in a direct and active way, benevolent sexism in an indirect and passive way. Hence, we suggest that gender-discriminational remarks of political elites can activate voters' latent sexism during election campaigns, which in turn influence their political attitudes.

The South Korean government did not recognize so-called ‘mixed-blood’ people who were born to U. S. servicemen and Korean women as full citizens, and therefore exported them overseas as adoptees or excluded them from the system of military conscription. In contrast, the government has endeavored to integrate the children of ‘multicultural families’, i.e., interracial marriages, a group that has recently emerged because of the increase in migrants since the late 1990s. What caused this transition? What commonalities and differences do these two policies have? To answer these questions, this paper attempts a historical sociological analysis of the genealogy of ‘mixed-blood’ people policy and ‘multicultural family’ policy in Korea. Borrowing from Michel Foucault, this article characterizes the former as a ‘juridical-disciplinary system’ and the latter as an instance of ‘governmentality’. Simultaneously, however, it maintains that both approaches are the mirror image of each other and built on the same notions of a national membership structure composed of patrilineage, legal marriage, and paternal principles of jus sanguinis. This politics of membership is also an instance of gender politics, founded on patriarchal laws that attribute family lineage, nationality, and national blood to male fertility. Based on this assertion, this paper argues that various challenges and difficulties that ‘mixed-blood’ people and multicultural families face in Korea can be solved only by radically transforming the gender politics of national membership.