Social Science Research Council

As a pilot project to explore cooperative relations between the SSRC and the Korea Research Foundation in promoting international research, we have funded postdoctoral research by eight scholars based in Korea and in the United States on Korean Migration and Development. Each fellowship of $25,000 supports a year of research on four different projects, which examine the social, political, and cultural aspects of both internal and international migration and development. The scale of the research ranges from families (rural-urban migrants and transnational kirogi households, which are comprised of children sent abroad with their mothers and supported by their fathers employed in Korea), to communities (Korean settlements in countries of the Pacific Rim), and to the nation (the political processes that manage the relationship between immigration and national development in Korea). That the fellows are based in both Korea and the United States brings diverse geographic as well as interdisciplinary perspectives to the research and enables the project to strengthen international scholarly networks between the two countries.

 2006-2007 Korean Migration and Development Research Fellows:

• Erik Mobrand, "Rural Families, Migration to Seoul, and Korean Development"

• John Finch and Seung-kyung Kim, "Global Citizens in the Making: Transnational Migration and Education in Kirogi Families"

• Petrice Flowers, Jungmin Seo, and James Spencer, "The Economic Impact of Korean Enclaves in the Pacific Rim"

• Dong-Hoon Seol and John Skrentny, "Emigration, Immigration, and Nation-Building in Korea"

To promote international collaborative ties between Korean and U.S.-based scholars and to draw attention to the contributions of migration to development, we organized meetings where our fellows can present their work to networks of migration scholars in the United States and Korea. In June 2006, at the beginning of their research, the fellows presented their research plans to the 4th Annual Summer Institute on International Migration, which was co-sponsored by the SSRC Migration Program and the Center for International Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. In June 2007, when their research will have been completed, the fellows will present their findings in Seoul before Korean and international scholars at a conference that is being co-sponsored with the Korea Migration Research Network and the Korea University’s Department of Sociology. We expect to publish the fellows’ final report in Korean and English.