Jeong-eun Rhee

International Students: Constructions of Imperialism in the Chronicle of Higher Education

This article links colonial/neocolonial and feminist literature with discourses on international students to examine how a discourse of imperialism constructs and represents international students in U.S. universities. Applying a critical discourse analysis to 78 articles published in the Chronicle of Higher Education between 1996 and 1999, the authors identified three themes of U.S. imperialism: international students as capital, international students as subjugated Others, and imperialism as self-identity. They discuss implications of portrayals of international students through an imperialist lens.

Re/membering (to) shifting alignments: Korean women’s transnational narratives in US higher education

At the location of alter‐native researcher in US higher education, the author interweaves two Korean women’s transnational narratives that intersect with her autobiographical route. Through this re‐narrativization, the paper discusses the material and ideological specificities that place each individual differently in engagements with various institutions yet simultaneously constitute them/us as Korean women in US higher education. The purpose is to enunciate these particular transnational existences that map out the unequal connections of seemingly distant geographies, histories and educations between Korea and the US. In doing so, the paper highlights how these women ambivalently appropriate and subvert their gendered, racialized and nationalized locations in order to free themselves and to rework the worlds in which they/we are living. By enacting this specific re‐narrativization, this paper argues for the proliferation of testimonies from and of particular history and geography as a way to decolonize global/local knowledge regimes.

Promiscuous (use of) feminist methodologies: the dirty theory and messy practice of educational research beyond gender

This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist methodology came to read our own work as promiscuous and interpret the terms “feminist” and “feminism” through both practice and theory. It marks the circulation of the term “promiscuous feminist methodology” and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The use of the phrase “promiscuous feminist” to describe methodology is not merely an attention-seeking oxymoron, though we hope that its irony is not lost. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of “feminists gone wild” tantalizing, though what we put forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. Because the theories we put to work “get dirty” as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices, promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. Set in motion by anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of feeling out of place in the academy and in feminism, we examine our personal, academic, and political engagement with these contradictions that became the springboard for this special issue.

Negotiating Collaboration Across Differences

Through auto-ethnographic approach, this article extends contemporary debates on the need to further conceptualize and practice collaborative approaches to research. By exploring the complex dimensions of collaboration, this discussion traces the challenges of researching communities one affiliates with, particularly in relation to ethnic, cultural, and “unusual” researcher-researched positional differences. Also, by describing the dilemmas faced in translating languages spoken by respondents, the authors explain how the issues of language and representation complicate the collaborative relationships of research. This discussion proposes that investigators reexamine how they have interacted with participants in everyday contexts and aims to help researchers redefine the meaning of collaborative research across differences.

Risking to Be Wounded Again: Performing Open Eye/I.

In this article, I narrate a self‐reflexive inquiry on the process of becoming an Asian/Korean immigrant woman of color in the US. The purpose is to provide a particular insight and identity site to address the urgent need to examine ways in which the increasing number of postcolonial immigrants of color and US racial minorities engage with each other to make sense of our intersected but very differential impacts of racism. The article is organized using three vignettes on differently racialized encounters – my arrival to the racialized ruins of Korea town in LA as a newcomer, a recurring encounter with a racial epithet that defines me as Chinese, and an anti‐racism session in an educational conference where I was disclaimed from being a person of color by another racialized group. Through these vignettes, I analyze the complex dynamics between very personal, affective experience and socio‐political structure and actions that have constituted my still evolving palimpsest identity. In conclusion, I argue for the significance of performing open eye/I that risks being wounded again by not clinging to an unquestionable ideal of who we are and rather using it as a base to learn with others. This is to live those unknown possibilities of becoming through infinite practices of anti‐racism toward the absence of racism.

A Porous, Morphing, and Circulatory Mode of Self-Other: Decolonizing Identity Politics by Engaging Transnational Reflexivity.

As im/migrant researchers of color working and living in the USA, we begin this article by discussing how our own transnational selves and research have created tensions with the normalized use of socially constructed and theorized categories and differences in US qualitative research practices. We theorize an alternative reflexive mode of conceptualizing a researcher self that can illuminate more contextually engaging understanding and relationships between researcher and researched within our transnational research contexts. We argue that our reflexive approach to researcher self as non‐unitary I, circulatory mode of porous and shifting entities simultaneously fracturing and morphing into each other in relation to its changing webs of relationships and history, can bring different ways of understanding and working with the ever changing and interconnected global‐local cultural, social, and political conditions and contexts of education and research.

International Education, The New Imperialism, and Technologies of the Self: Branding the Globally Educated Elite

Abstract Utilizing a Foucauldian model of “governmentality” in the context of the new imperialism and conceptualizing international education as an apparatus of contemporary global power relation, this paper examines what kind of a globally educated self is narrated, imagined, and constructed in Korean international education discourse and practice. Considering its specific context where US higher education is perceived as the most dominant and thus desired model of international education, the paper attempts to bring a more nuanced understanding on the dynamics of education and power relations between Korea and the US as the interplay of the new imperialism and subjectivity. Drawing from student authored trade books along with ethnographic and artifact data collected in Korea, the paper maps out three levels of discursive practices - national, educational, and individual levels - on international education in Korea. By analyzing the emerging discourse and practice of a globally educated (elite) self across these three levels, the paper discusses how these practices and discourses of self are coordinated and regulated and how individuals internalize this new identity. In doing so, the analysis reveals further about the politics of international education through which educational imagination, desire and identity are now implicated in the work of the new imperialism.

Colonizing and Decolonizing Projects of Re/Covering Spirituality

In this postcolonial inquiry, we analyze how spirituality has been simultaneously appropriated/re-covered and re-appropriated/recovered for the purpose of (re)colonizing as well as decolonizing projects. By drawing from discrete yet interconnected literatures of decolonizing, (post)(anti)colonial, Indigenous, and ethnic studies based theories, we discuss the concept of transformative spirituality as a useful analytic lens. This project intersects with larger questions of neo/colonial historical and social structures and conditions of life such as empire, nation-state, race, gender, etc. Transformative aspects of spirituality not only critique how spirituality of the Others has been appropriated within the neo/colonial and neoliberal imagination for the salvation of the Western/neoliberal Self but also speaks about how spirituality can be a space of possibility or recovery for different marginalized communities. While providing decolonizing critiques on the current popularity of spirituality in Western societies as Orientalism and (re)colonization of the Others, we present how transformative spirituality can be mobilized to open up a space beyond Western-modern-colonial-scientific knowledge/truth/power regimes to serve political emancipatory goals. Despite historically situated different approaches toward decolonizing across variously colonized communities, our analysis on spirituality demonstrates how marginalized communities have always critiqued Orientalist spirituality and developed alternative spaces of spirituality that seek social change and transformative politics.

Working on a failed research: promiscuity of wanting and doing both ways

By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop’s fable, “the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast.” In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting her postcolonial feminist subjectivity with the positioning of the bat in the fable, the author re-engages with the moral of the story that instructs exclusive loyalty, and highlights the promiscuous potential of the bat. Through this re-engagement, she examines how feminist researcher subjectivity, epistemology, and methodology can function both as the demand of exclusive loyalty and as the transgressive desire and move (of the bat). Then, how can she both refuse and take refuge in feminist research? The promiscuity of wanting and doing both is a contradiction that enables the author to re-visit her research with Korean working class parents in New York City schools, which she thought she had failed two years ago. Through three accounts of failure that involve (1) the divide between the condition of researcher employment and the needs of the field; (2) the divide between usable and unusable data; and (3) the divide between theoretical complexity and material simplicity, the author discusses how she promiscuously – persistently and patiently – re-engages with these divides in her failed research.

Activism as/in/for Global Citizenship: Putting Un-Learning to Work Towards Educating the Future

This chapter explores activism as/in/for global citizenship theoretically, historically, and in practice. We argue one necessarily learns hierarchical violences that disconnect the world and self from the so-called Other. Therefore, to think and act more relationally, and outside of regimes of truth, requires a radically different way of knowing that does not simply follow our usual habits, but unlearns them (Foucault in Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. Pantheon Books, New York, 1980; Spivak in An aesthetic education in the era of globalization. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012). Thus, we focus on the long-term project of ‘decolonising the mind’ (wa Thiongʼo in Decolonizing the mind. James Currey, London, 1986). To do this, we explicitly connect theory to practice and we draw on contemporary events and materials, such as Black Lives Matter and Marjane Satrapi’s (Persepolis. Pantheon, New York, 2003). We also provide examples, questions, and materials that educators, teachers, practitioners, and students can access and ponder.