This study presents a qualitative case study of the Daon Union (a pseudonym), a conservative student group composed of middle and high school students, and examines the formation of political identities as well as the interaction between political ide...
This study presents a qualitative case study of the Daon Union (a pseudonym), a conservative student group composed of middle and high school students, and examines the formation of political identities as well as the interaction between political identity and historical consciousness. Drawing on positioning theory, the study analyzes how political identities are formed through social interaction and explores the construction of historical narratives through intertextual processes conceptualized as repetition, resistance, and creation. In addition, by focusing on participants’ understandings of historical evidence, the study investigates the relationship between political identity and the ways learners read and interpret historical sources. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and task-based in-depth interviews with 13 members of the Daon Union conducted from April 2023 to February 2024, along with an analysis of posts from the group’s official social media accounts, participants’ Facebook activity, and records of collective reading discussions produced from October 2019 to March 2024.
The findings show that participants formed their political identities through ongoing processes of positioning. They positioned themselves in opposition to feminism and the ‘left’. As women’s movements gained public visibility following the 2016 Gangnam Station murder and the 2018 Hyehwa Station protests, participants adopted a critical stance toward feminism and began to articulate a conservative political identity. The Daon Union, to which the participants belong, viewed the Christian claims of sexual distinction and sexual conservatism as providing a counter-logic to feminism. Based on the logic that feminism is communism, they categorized feminists and the ‘left’ into the same group. Participants positioned themselves in opposition as the ‘right’, thereby consolidating a conservative identity. A series of incidents they experienced further shaped this process, as participants actively used social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to define the categories, values, and characteristics of the ‘left’ and prescribed the signifiers and signifieds of the concepts used by the ‘left’.
The study also demonstrates a close connection between political identity and historical consciousness. Recognizing the need for historical learning appropriate for a conservative identity, participants engaged with conservative historical narratives, particularly those advanced by Pastor Choi Jin-su and New Right scholar Lee Young-hoon. They participated in reading discussions about Syngman Rhee and visited sites related to Park Chung-hee. As part of their historical learning, participants ‘repeated’ conservative historical narratives, including the Korean Peninsula communization narrative(i.e., narrative portraying the Korean Peninsula as being communized under the leadership of the Soviet Union) grounded in Choi Jin-su’s founding-of-the-nation narrative, while simultaneously ‘resisting’ progressive historical narratives concerning the armed struggle of the Gwangju 5・18 citizen army, the meaning of the May 18 spirit, and narratives related to reunification and anti-Japanese sentiment. Participants further criticized progressive narratives by linking seemingly unrelated topics to what they perceived as a progressive older generation. This process also shows that ‘resistance’ and diametric positioning can function as primary elements in narrative construction. Through the selective appropriation, reframing, and modification, such as twisting or refracting of both conservative and progressive narratives, participants ‘created’ new historical narratives, from which moral ethics emphasizing responsibility and duty as conservatives were also generated. These newly ‘created’ narratives often served to ‘repeat’, support, and strengthen existing conservative narratives. In the process of constructing narratives where repetition, resistance, and creation intersected, past experiences, present interpretations, and future orientations continuously overlapped, reinforcing conservative historical narratives and leading participants to become increasingly critical of progressive historical narratives. At the same time, mediation through political, national, regional, and religious identities produced variations in historical narratives even among members of the same group.
The analysis also reveals a close relationship between political identity, historical consciousness, and historical evidence concepts. Analysis of task-based interviews on participants’ understanding of historical evidence related to the leading forces of the Jeju 4·3 incident revealed that 9 out of 10 participants recognized the characteristics of the materials and authors relatively well. Nevertheless, 5 of the 9 participants who recognized sourcing practices failed to construct historical context, as the sourcing process constrained and hindered the corroboration process (cross-examination of historical sources), preventing them from grasping the historical context. These participants selectively relied on materials produced by authors they considered trustworthy, while excluding sources produced by authors they deemed unreliable, labeling them false, distorted, or erroneous. In some cases, they developed speculative and imaginative hypotheses unrelated to the materials to justify such exclusions. Rather than constructing historical context through evidence, participants evaluated whether sources aligned with the ‘Korean Peninsula communization narrative’ collectively constructed by the Daon Union and dismissed those that did not, often inferring historical situations based on generalized assumptions about the top-down command structure of the South Korean Workers’ Party (Namnodang). The findings further indicate that although they claimed to cross-check historical sources or contrasting perspectives, their tendency to selectively choose data made it difficult to grasp the historical context. The study also shows that the concept of historical evidence is linked to an understanding of historical facts versus interpretation. Participants tended to regard historical sources as historical facts or history itself and did not fully recognize the provisional and interpretive nature of historical understanding, which negatively affected moments of political identity transition. The findings of this study indicate that these results are attributable not only to insufficient learning of the concept of historical evidence in school history education, but also to the implicit socialization of attitudes and dispositions toward historical narratives and historical evidence through conservative and progressive older generations in a politically polarized South Korean society.
In conclusion, these results show that the formation of political identity is closely intertwined with the construction of historical narratives. Historical narratives were shaped through dynamic intertextual interactions between conservative and progressive perspectives, together with participants’ understandings of disciplinary features of history, such as historical evidence, which contributed to the reinforcement of political identity bias. These findings highlight the ongoing and reciprocal interaction between political identity and historical consciousness. These interactions, in turn, are shaped by and interact with the broader socio-historical contexts in which learners are positioned.