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Special studies group focuses on archiving experience of Korean students

Every semester, the Smith College Special Studies course allows students to delve deeper into an area of study or subject matter of common academic interest with a faculty member or a small group. With the rise in interest in Korean studies over the past few years, a range of Special Studies have been conducted within the East Asian Studies department, such as “Reconciliation Between North and South Korea,” “Art and Identity in Contemporary South Korean Art,” and “Missionary Work in the Late 19th Century Korea.”

This semester, six Smith College students—Andrea Kang ’13, Minjee Kim ’15, Symone Gosby ’15, Elisabeth Mah ’15, Cecilia Kim ’16, and Hannah Jun ’16—formed a Special Studies group with Jina Kim, assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Smith College. The group identified themselves as the Archiving Korean Students’ Experiences at Smith (AKSES) team. Their project, “Archiving the Experience(s) of Korean and Korean-American Students at Smith” was a continuation and extension of work the students began last semester in Professor Kim’s “Korean Diaspora: Korea Inside and Outside” course. The research revolved around accessing, documenting, and understanding the myriad of different identities and experiences of Korean and Korean-American students and alumnae at Smith College.

According to Professor Kim, “the primary goal of the project [was] to document the kinds of experiences Korean and Korean-American students had while they were attending Smith and to understand what these experiences tell us about a segment of the student of color at Smith College… to understand the history and culture of Smith College, the United States, and the world we live in, in relation to race, class, and gender.”

Students met with Professor Kim once a week to share their research findings, analyze surveys, and discuss topic questions such as, “when did we start seeing a sizable number of Korean and Korean American students at Smith College?” and “how does this reflect the larger historical and political changes taking places in the US and in Korea?”

As this was a project related to culture and race, precautionary measures were made in order to conduct surveys of current Korean and Korean American students at Smith College as well as alumnae. The members of the Special Studies group, including Professor Kim, were required to go through a human subject research training and the surveys had to be approved by the Smith College Institutional Review Board. Due to time constraints, the students had to make the survey anonymous. According to Andrea Kang ’13, the issue of inclusiveness was another challenge the group had to overcome in surveying Korean and Korean-American students and alumnae. She commented that one of “the difficulties in conducting this research [was] trying be as inclusive of all Korean students’ and alumnae experiences as possible. Questions that we as researchers struggled with were mostly about how we can best be inclusive but at the same time not reinforce this idea of a multicultural melting pot, which is not reflective of U.S. American society and culture…. U.S. American society is “polycultural” not a melting pot of different cultures, but rather a society that shares and celebrates differences.”

Despite the difficulties, the research went very well. Professor Kim said that she was “very impressed by the work of the research team who enthusiastically took on the project and shaped it”.

On April 20, AKSES members presented their results at the “Celebrating Collaborations: Student and Faculty Working Together” showcase, an event at which Smith students present their scholarly work. After their presentation, the AKSES students completed their formal research papers and submitted their work to be archived at the College Archives.

“I hope to use the research we have already done and what this year’s research team has produced to continue the project in subsequent years,” said Professor Kim. “History never ends, and I hope a generation of future Smithies can add on to the groundbreaking work that this year’s research team has begun.”

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