• Date: November 24th, Friday, 2023, 9:00 – 17:30
• Location: International Conference Room, 4th Floor, GSIS (Bldg. 140-2)

While some discussions of racism are taking place in Korean society, there are still many difficulties lurking in discussing what race or racism is in the Korean context. Calling the Korean hostility toward certain groups racism would cause problems as the origin of that hostility is irrelevant to the demographic categories of race in the West in many cases, and it is tricky whether we should call the hostility racism or nationalism. These problems seem to be suffered not only in Korean society but in most of the non-Western Asian world, albeit in different contexts and ways. The difficulty of thinking about race or racism outside of the American academia, which is leading critical race theory, would be caused not solely by the matter of translation. Thus, the Korean Social History Association, Seoul National University Asia Center Northeast Asia Center, and Ewha Womans University Asian Center for Women’s Studies are holding a joint academic conference, “Racism without Race: Studying Racialization from Asian Perspective”. In Asia, where is it hard to define the categories of ‘race’, how can we understand and study the situation in which the discourse of racism overfloods? For the conceptualization of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ from an Asian perspective, what kind of theoretical and practical projects would we need? As can be seen from the title, this conference would be the first step toward seeking answers to these questions. Through these questions, we seek to create a field of discussions that would incubate the research of socialization and racism in Korea and Asia.