With the generous support of the Korea Institute Undergraduate Summer Research Travel Grant, I traveled to South Korea this summer and conducted research interviews in order to write my senior thesis for Social Studies on the political identities and activist attitudes of students at Korea’s top universities in Seoul. Immediately when I arrived in Seoul, I focused on first recruiting interviewees from members and officers of student councils. During Korea’s democratization period of the 1970s-1980s, students were the vanguards leaders of the protest, and many students were organized by the student councils that formed at the top universities. Therefore, student councils, as important loci of political organization, have an interesting part in the narrative of student activism since, in present time, they are faced with a choice of remaining strongly activist or separating themselves from political and social issues to focus on campus-only issues and events. My interviews with individual student council members enabled me to more deeply understand how the student councils’ historic legacies interestingly created sometimes unwanted pressure on their members to be more activist and political than they wanted. However, some of my interviewees were firm in their belief that it was the duty of the student council to be the source of political activism on university campuses since the council had the authority and ability to organize and inform the student body.
Other than student councils, I also was able to speak in-depth with student activists acting independently of their school’s student council. Some of my students were involved with independent human rights groups (e.g. labor rights, women’s rights) outside of campus due to their own conviction in taking action to better the lives or conditions for specific social groups. Interestingly, some of this independent involvement was purely virtual since some groups were only comprised of strong online communities whose members never actually met in person except for certain events or protests. One of my interview experiences that stands out most in my mind was a meeting with a student involved in a high-profile, on-campus student protest that had been virtually organized through an anonymous online community only accessible to that university’s enrolled students. Initially, it was extremely difficult to recruit this individual for an interview since the protestors did not even know each other due to the anonymous nature of the protest’s organization and staffing; furthermore, the protestors had agreed to not do individual interviews due to concern that the media would twist the message of their protest. However, this individual agreed to be interviewed for purely academic purposes, and I was able to receive a perspective on the organization, motivations, and concerns of a high-profile student protest that I could not have obtained through Korean media coverage. At the moment, I felt fortunate to be a student researcher in Korea this summer because that interview was truly a once in a lifetime research experience.
I left Korea with the lasting impression that, due to political and economic changes over the past few decades, Korean student activism has transformed in that students are finding new ways to express their political opinions or spark discussion or action regarding social issues. However, I was fascinated by how student activism still utilizes one particular mode of political expression. For my research, I collected student-written political magazines and newspapers, but I especially focused on gathering photos of daejabo, poster essays expressing an individual’s strong opinions that have been used as a medium of political expression in East Asia for centuries. Daejabo are still present on university campus bulletin boards today in Seoul, and many of my interviewees referenced the rippling impact of certain ones on campus when describing certain recent events that had sparked student activism. While I still have to analyze my collection of paper materials and the contents of the daejabo, I was amazed to find that, despite how technologically wired South Koreans are today, the daejabo still serves a purpose on the university campus, providing such a strong impression that compels passing students to stop and read or inspires a chain of responding daejabo. As I continue to analyze my research and begin writing my thesis, I know that this summer will remain one of the experiences that will inspire in me conviction and passion for years to come.