The Sewol Ferry Disaster Lecture

The 2015 Kim Dae-Jung Lecture in Korean Studies presents “People (國民), Citizens (市民), and Refugees (難民): The Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea and the Politics of Survival, Violence and Mourning”.

Haejoang Cho is a pioneering South Korean feminist intellectual who is Professor Emeritus at Yonsei University, where she taught social anthropology and cultural studies.

Her lecture is about the aftermath of the sinking of the ferry Sewol in April 2014, which claimed over 300 lives, most of them secondary school students. It focuses particularly on the split of the public response in South Korea into two antagonistic groups: those who say “never forget!” and those who urge people to “forget and go back to normal life!” Cho explores the meanings of mourning in the context of South Korea’s compressed capitalist modernization and discusses how the notion of “risk society” captures the lived experience of people in the country.

time: 5pm 23th Fri. Oct. 2015
location: Robinson College, Cambridge