Summary of SEAA READS, session nine, 4/2024
June Hee Kwon 2023 Borderland Dreams, The transnational lives of Korean Chinese Workers. https://www.dukeupress.edu/borderland-dreams Our bookclub discussion this time was hosted by Student Councilor, Sojung Kim. Since parts of the book locations and people overlap with her own dissertation work, she gave some added context to the issues of kinship (sponsored visas, remittances, wartime separation of relatives) and transnational dimensions of fieldwork. With people joining the online conversation from several time zones, the get-together itself was transnational in some ways. One member was online at a Seoul cafe, potentially a job site for the Korean Chinese workers introduced in the book who tend to concentrate in construction, restaurant, and other service sectors. Impressions from readers included matters of method (knowing more about the setting for interviews and if there were others also present), the ethnographic nature of writing about lives (from one’s fieldwork analyzed - ho...