Presented by Dr. Albert L. Park
Monday October 26, 2020 from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (PDT)
The Zoom link will be sent to registrants.
Talk Summary:
How should we read the environment? How does reading the environment help us to locate the origins of modern Korea’s environmental problems? How should we organize and narrate the events, occurrences and entities of environmental history in Korea? This presentation traces the origins of environmental issues in the late nineteenth century, when Chosŏn Korea joined transnational, top-down drives to modernize its agriculture. Going beyond the simplistic binary of the exploitative cities (and industrialists) vs. exploited agrarian areas (and farmers), this presentation aims to illuminate how power, the ecological environment, and agricultural practices have shaped each other since the late nineteenth century in ways that set the stage for what came to be identified as environmental problems since the 1960s. Overall, this presentation calls for spatially reconceptualizing “environmental problems” and using the paradigm of “everyday ecology” to shift our focus from industrialization in cities to agriculture and the rural in reading the environment and writing a critical environmental history of Korea.
How to register?
Please fill out a form here by October 24.
