Speaker: Jeongsu Shin, LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University

Description:

This talk explores how memory, ecology, and place intertwine in the Giving Forest of Jeju Island, South Korea. Once a site of violence during the April 3rd Uprising and mid-twentieth-century state massacres, and later a space of afforestation and eco-tourism development, the Giving Forest has become a living archive of layered histories and ecological regeneration. Drawing on ethnographic research with Jejuan villagers, conservationists, and environmental activists, I trace how people engage with these landscapes as spaces of mourning, care, and resistance. By attending to the social and affective lives of the Giving Forest, this talk invites us to consider how multispecies relations hold memory and articulate claims to justice. In doing so, the talk illuminates how acts of remembering simultaneously reconstruct social and material worlds

Speaker's bio:

Jeongsu Shin is the LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University. An ethnographer of Korea, her work bridges Environmental Studies, Asian Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Her book project, Worldly Ecologies: Landscape, History, and Decolonial Environmentalism on Jeju Island, explores how environmental movements and ecological research in Jeju, South Korea, have shaped new understandings of Jejuan identity and autonomy, tracing their roots through colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal development to the present.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.