Research
My research interests lie in-between globalization, social change, historical sociology, and the sociology of education. Specifically, I pay my attention to overseas education (study abroad for degree acquisition) as a locus where the strategy is performed. I situate this theoretical question on the case of South Korea, a developmental state which has maintained its national passion to send its students to the United States for decades. I currently work on the shifting nature of Korean students’ decisions about studying in the United States for my dissertation project. Through a comparative-historical and discourse analysis of the study abroad phenomenon since the mid-20th century, I attempt to figure out how the American educational credential (institutionalized cultural capital) has operated as a social closure mechanism in Korea, and how the mechanism has changed through the (inter)national social changes. My research question is about how the globally high-ranked elite American universities have become highly-regarded institutionalized cultural capital among the people of developing countries, and how the evaluation has changed according to social changes. With this analytic lens, I am trying to expand the applicability of Bourdieu’s cultural capital/reproduction theory in the era of globalization.