1.5 Generation Working-Class Korean American Community College Students and the Fragile Sense of Social Belonging

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Friday, March 26, 2021 | 6PM to 8PM

This study by Dr. Sujung Kim interrogates working-class Korean immigrant students’ sense of social belonging and their strategies to advocate their social membership, focusing on working-class 1.5 generation Korean American students at Station Community College (SCC), a public community college in Chicago. These immigrant community college students are part of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) generation, who have directly and indirectly witnessed and experienced the devastating impact of neoliberal reforms by the IMF during the 1997 and 2008 financial crises in Korea on people’s ordinary lives, and the political-economic situational impacts on their families’ migration to the United States. This study proposes that these working-class Korean immigrant community college students’ navigation of their belonging is shaped by the dialectical mechanisms between various macro- and micro-level of political-economic, social, cultural and educational components.

Author Bio

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Sujung Kim is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research addresses the critical pedagogy of higher education and community colleges for the public good and educating students as critical public intellectuals. Dr. Kim earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is presently a Mellon Humanities Alliance Research Fellow at the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Dr. Kim’s research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of class, race, citizenship, power, and subjectivity, and how these intersecting conditions affect vulnerable college students’ sense of institutional and social belonging. She also focuses on access to postsecondary education, retention, and outcomes and how these factors impact students’ further educational, career, and life trajectories.

Dr. Kim’s current book project examines the interrelations among neoliberal community college policies and politics, the globalization of community colleges, and the restructuring of racial and class relationships among diverse student populations. In addition, her work considers the complex mechanisms through which lower middle- and working-class Korean international students are created as (potential) transnational, adrift, cheap laborers.