The Candlelight Movement Democracy And Communication In Korea

This book examines key features, problems, and implications of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement, a historical cornerstone for democracy and social movements in South Korea. The Candlelight Movement brought profound social changes with important lessons and questions for scholars, practitioners, activists, and the public. To examine the full complexity of the movement, this edited volume utilises wide-ranging methodological and theoretical approaches, which include case study approaches, ethnography, survey, feminist film criticism, critical discourse analysis, and rhetorical criticism. Chapters place ‘communication’ at the centre of their analyses, calling attention to the mediated and mediatised, the performative and other discursive practices of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement. In doing so, the book discusses not only the usual players and factors – nor the institutions that exert their influence through democratic politics and the public sphere – but also the counter-public embracing new and social media, collective singing, the body, and performance, as their choice of political media. As such, this volume offers important insights into how communication plays a critical role in forming, moving, and transforming new social movements. The Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea will appeal to students and scholars of communication and media studies, political science, sociology, and Korean studies.

Digital Media, Online Activism, and Social Movements in Korea deepens the current understanding of online activism and its impacts on society by highlighting how various forms of social movements have been mobilized in Korea. Through exploring movements in Korea such as political participation based on SNS, the 2008 U.S. beef protests, and the 2016-2017 candlelight vigils, the contributors study the intersection of digital media platforms, current trends, and social, cultural, and political conditions within Korean society. Using a wide range of events and movements, this book analyzes how people have utilized the development of digital media to facilitate social movements and effect social change.

​Igniting the Internet is one of the first books to examine in depth the development and consequences of Internet-born politics in the twenty-first century. It takes up the new wave of South Korean youth activism that originated online in 2002, when the country’s dynamic cyberspace transformed a vehicular accident involving two U.S. servicemen into a national furor that compelled many Koreans to reexamine the fifty-year relationship between the two countries. Responding to the accident, which ended in the deaths of two high school students, technologically savvy youth went online to organize demonstrations that grew into nightly rallies across the nation. Internet-born, youth-driven mass protest has since become a familiar and effective repertoire for activism in South Korea, even as the rest of the world has struggled to find its feet with this emerging model of political involvement. Igniting the Internet focuses on the cultural dynamics that have allowed the Internet to bring issues rapidly to public attention and exert influence on both domestic and international politics. The author combines a robust analysis of online communities with nuanced interview data to theorize a “cultural ignition process”—the mechanisms and implications for popular politics in volatile Internet-driven activism—in South Korea and beyond. She offers a unique perspective on how local actors experience and remember the cultural dynamics of Internet-born activism and how these experiences shape the political identities of a generation who has essentially come of age in cyberspace, the so-called digital natives or millennials. South Korea’s debates on the nature of youth-driven Internet protest reverberated around the world following the events in Tahrir Square in 2010 and Zuccotti Park in 2011. Igniting the Internetoffers numerous points of comparison with countries following a path of technological development and urban youth formation similar to that of South Korea with a thorough consideration of general structural changes and locally specific triggers for Internet activism. Readers interested in social movement theory and new media in social context as well as students and scholars of Korean studies will find the work both far-reaching and insightful.

This book focuses on the changing role of media in the more democratised political landscape of South Korea. It contributes to debates about the emerging role of the media in democratic transition, especially in relation to approaches that go beyond traditional Western constructs of media freedom and the relationship between the state and the media.

This book examines three ironic phenomena of South Korean democracy that have developed after its democratic transition in 1987. While the evaluation of South Korea’s political system by external institutions has steadily improved, people’s trust in the nation’s political system continues to decline. However, in the face of political distrust, unlike in Western democracies, voter turnout has increased. Even though political participation and the political influence of citizens have been strengthened over time, the political influence of civic organizations that fostered the initial democratization movement in the 1980s has weakened, parallel to the decline in citizens’confidence in these organizations. Why is South Korean democracy witnessing ironic phenomena that cannot be succinctly explained by existing theories of political development or democracy? This book seeks these answers within the framework of a twotrack democracy, that is, the interplay between institutional and contentious politics. A model of democracy that combines contentious politics with formal politics can shed light on this phenomenon. Yun proposed that the traditional hierarchical and elite-centered political system is no longer sustainable. In order to resolve the democratic deficiency perceived by citizens, it is necessary to consider a new model of democracy beyond the improvement of representative democracy. Moreover, the new model of democracy should be based on a fusion of institutional politics and contentious politics. The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the politics of South Korea democratization and democracy more generally.

The recent candlelight protests in the fall and winter of 2016 and 2017 marked a critical moment in the maturation of South Korean democracy. Through complex connections between contributing actors involving the protesting public, the National Assembly, and the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Korea, President Park Geun-hye became the first South Korea president to be impeached through democratic procedures. While acknowledging the significant differences that distinguish this most recent protest wave with contentious politics of the past, this article highlights the foundational legacies of South Korea's authoritarian history. In addition, I reflect on how the contemporary candlelight protest industry draws on organizational and cultural resources first established in past democracy movements. In short, the political contest that brought down Park Geun-hye in 2016-2017 was in some tangible and intangible ways a reenactment of the authoritarian and democratization legacies that dominated much of South Korea's modern history.

An analysis of rights-based activism in South Korea, including case studies of women, workers, disabled persons, migrants, and sexual minorities.

As social media scholarship matures, early optimism has been replaced by a more complex and arguably gloomier picture of the role of digital media platforms in our lives. This incisive Research Handbook showcases the academic community’s responses to key societal challenges posed by evolving social media ecologies.

This book examines the transformation and the dynamic reconfiguration of borders within Korea through inter/trans-disciplinary approaches. The book offers a comprehensive synthesis for the changing geo-political, cultural, and economic dynamics among Korea’s diasporas by applying the theme of “diasporas within homeland” as a theoretical lens. While diaspora remains a central theoretical perspective (often highlighting “out of home” experiences), the volume turns its gaze inward, “within homeland,” to trace internal displacement, mobility, and diversity in Korea. In addition, this volume brings diverse scholarly traditions that bridge the diaspora with a wide range of theoretical lenses and methodological approaches, such as intercultural sensitivity and adaptation, acculturation, ideology critique, alienation, national memory, and postcolonialism. The book further explores the possibilities of coalition-building between/among diverse communities. As a study of the notion of Korean identity and citizenship, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Korean society and culture, Asian diasporas, cultural anthropology, and ethnicity.