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Korea Colloquium
Ju Hui Judy Han, Assistant Professor in Geography, University of Toronto, Scarborough
Ju Hui Judy Han (PhD, UC Berkeley) is Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Her research interests include missionary mobilities, church growth and urban poverty, transnational political economy of English, conscientious objection to military conscription, and religious cultivation of political homophobia. She is currently completing a book manuscript concerning Korean/American evangelical missionaries engaged in religious, humanitarian, and development projects.
Chaired by Nicholas Harkness, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University
Abstract
In the US and South Korea, short-term evangelical Christian mission trips have emerged as a popular form of religious experience, emphasizing cultural exchange, volunteer service, and development aid as a preferred mode of mission encounter. Not only do such trips typically articulate notions of progress and advancement while obscuring divergent geographies and persistent inequalities, but in the case of contemporary South Korean evangelical developmentalism, they also rely on an affective idiom of historical solidarity with the developing world. Drawing on ethnographic research of a Korean/American mission trip to Tanzania and Uganda and other evangelical projects, this talk examines the cultural politics of religion, travel, and aid.
The Korea Colloquium is generously supported by the Min Young-Chul Memorial Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University
* Video available for view at: https://vimeo.com/channels/koreainstitute