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Opinion

Blogs

Fri, August 6, 2021 | 06:49

K-retrowave and AKMU

K-pop dominates the news with its schizophrenic approach to genre-bending and dizzying choreography. Yet despite this assault and insistence on heavily trained idol music, many find solace elsewhere. Amongst everything else, lo-fi, vaporwave, chillwave, retrowave and their various subgenres have all become popular over the past decade, providing the hypnagogic soundtrack for ...

2021-08-01 08:20

Korea's vaccine failure?

The tenth biggest economy in the world, its boy band crushing the U.S. Billboard all summer, and companies like Samsung as genuine powerhouses in the international arena, Korea is truly a cultural and economic phenomenon that has successfully transitioned from a post-colonial military dictatorship to a thriving democracy in a tough art of the world.

2021-07-24 13:38

Hegemony and K-pop

“We don't want to change our identity or our genuineness to get the number one. Like if we sing suddenly in full English, and change all these other things, then that's not BTS,” said RM of Korea's world famous pop group in a 2019 interview with Time magazine.

2021-07-17 09:34

Korean gender equality

After gaining its independence in 1948, South Korea's newly-established constitution introduced legal equality between the sexes, prohibiting political, economic, and social discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, or social status. It is interesting to note that whereas in other countries such rights were fought for, in Korea the legal rights were largely given. And at ...

2021-07-11 08:36

K-culture wars

Korea is a country that frequently tops internationals lists, whether Billboard charts, innovation rankings, connectivity to the internet, suicide rates, working hours, or declining birthrates. For better and for worse, the country is now a cultural, economic, and technological powerhouse on the world stage that rightly holds its own against far bigger states. Its post-coloni...

2021-07-03 09:51

Kim Jong-un: Prisoner in his own castle?

Few of us can claim the experience of living and working in Pyongyang for eight years, but that is exactly what German Ambassador Thomas Schafer has done. Following his retirement from the Foreign Office and a career that took him to China, Hong Kong and Venezuela, Schafer has written a book on his time in North Korea - a collection of memories, experiences and various intera...

2021-06-27 17:05

Youth and Korean politics

Speaking of the French Revolution, the English poet William Wordsworth remarked, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.” The youth are a vital part of a functioning society and creating a vibrant and effective democracy. Young people are capable of overturning authoritarianism and enacting changes in power

2021-06-19 09:46

The new normal

The “new normal” is reading about a sex crime in South Korea, seeing the lenient sentence, and then sighing as you realize that there'll be another one to get equally as exasperated about in a week's time.

2021-06-13 15:01

Ethnocentric Korean politics

I've just finished teaching a six-week course on Korean history and culture to a group of young visiting scholars from Wellesley College, Massachusetts. One of the most important things I tried to stress was that to understand Korea, they must try to see it through Korean eyes. Not easy! Perhaps not actually possible either, especially in such a short period of time. Yet the ...

2021-06-05 11:49

Taiwan is a country

In the summer of 2009, we boarded a flight for Taiwan. During our time there, we ate, drank and partied with the locals while taking in as much of what the country and people had to offer as we could. The vacation still remains one of my favorite trips and the memories are a source of constant conversation among those who went. I looked over the photos again while writing thi...

2021-05-29 12:23

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