The Politics of Conditional Citizenship in South Korea: An Analysis of the Print Media

Abstract

This article shows how the meaning of citizenship has changed in South Korea since the partial emergence of a multicultural society in the past two decades. It does so by analysing how newspaper editorials have discussed multiculturalism, which is a multifaceted concept but one which weighs heavily on notions of citizenship.

The good, the bad, and the pretty

“…In line with such expectations, the media perpetuates a construction of conditional citizenship (Hundt, Walton and Lee 2019). Though overt framing of migrants as disruptions to the social order is rare, migrants are still expected to assimilate culturally so that they do not form a 'disruptive force' to the nation (Kim 2012;Hundt, Walton and Lee 2019). Song (2019), for example, finds that migrant mothers are 'required to actively produce and consume Korean food ' (197) and, by extension, must demonstrate their alignment with Korean culture as a whole.…”

“…In line with such expectations, the media perpetuates a construction of conditional citizenship (Hundt, Walton and Lee 2019). Though overt framing of migrants as disruptions to the social order is rare, migrants are still expected to assimilate culturally so that they do not form a 'disruptive force' to the nation (Kim 2012;Hundt, Walton and Lee 2019).…”

“…While important, they do not explicitly examine constructions of 'good' and 'bad' migrants, which is only briefly referred to by Eydam (2020). As such underlying expectations -much like those of assimilation (Eydam 2020;Kim 2012;Song 2019;Oh and Oh 2016;Hundt, Walton and Lee 2019) -still affect migrants' experiences in Korea, it is important to bring awareness to the ways in which Korean media implicitly categorises migrant traits and identities in terms of 'good' and 'bad' . This paper aims to study exactly this issue, answering the following question: how does popular South Korean media construct notions of 'good' and 'bad' migrants?…”

“…Thus, the programmes do feature migrants with more conservative views and treat them as equals, thereby not overtly excluding them from the 'ideal' category. However, the framing of their views underlines the aforementioned pattern of preference for migrants who match the majority norms and values of today's Korea (Eydam 2020) -again, those migrants who pose the least disruptive force to modern Korean society (Hundt, Walton and Lee 2019;Kim 2012).…”

Banal Koreanness: National imagery in multicultural-themed television shows

“…On the one hand, Korea claims a monoethnic past (see Lie, 2014), premised on the notion of tanil minjok (one ethnic people). On the other hand, there is widespread public awareness in Korea of neologisms such as ‘globalisation’ (Lee, 2016) and ‘multiculturalism’ (Hundt et al, 2019). It is within this social milieu that multicultural-themed reality shows have exploded in popularity.…”