Reaching for the World: Korean/American Missionary Aspirations and Evangelical Encounters

Date: 

Thursday, October 4, 2012, 4:30pm to 6:30pm

Location: 

Porté Seminar Room (S250), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Korea Colloquium

Event Poster

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