Conceptualizing the Idea of 세계시민 in Korean Public Discourse

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

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다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This three-year study explores in depth how the concept of 세계시민, or global citizen in the Korean language, has been communicated and interpreted in the Republic of Korea and abroad since the term first became visible in Korea during the early 1990s. During the past two decades, the idea of ‘global citizenship’ has generated a great deal of interest within the fields of political theory, political sociology and international relations. The study of cosmopolitanism and conceptions of ‘global citizenship’ has also been accompanied by increasing strategies and programs across the educational arena intended to encourage young people to grow into actively engaged citizens of an interdependent world. While the notion of ‘global citizenship’ – in theory as well as in practice – has been reasonably well examined in the West, and particularly across the English speaking world, contemporary conceptions of global citizenship emerging outside the English language have been barely analyzed. Indeed, no studies have yet examined how public understandings and discourses of ‘global citizenship’ have emerged indigenously within other languages, such as Japanese, German, French and Korean.
This study represents an effort to close the gap in our knowledge by providing a thorough accounting of h