Michael Hurt | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Hurt

I would like to thank all those who offered their moral support while the dissertation writing pr... more I would like to thank all those who offered their moral support while the dissertation writing process lagged due to my investment of time and energy in other worthy endeavors and ways of exploring Korea. Special thanks must go to Mama Hurt-Hyunsup Song Hurt, who never flagged in her mental and material support of this present, scholarly Endeavor, even as many around me were becoming more sure that I was destined to forever be a "professional student." Thanks are also due to those friends who lent their ears and eyes towards the honing of many ideas and words into this dissertation.

Korean Instagram is in the midst of a phenomenon involving the creation and self-marketing of alt... more Korean Instagram is in the midst of a phenomenon involving the creation and self-marketing of alter ego identities-"bu-kae"-that create a culture in which more specific, digital subcultures lead to the formation of real communities offline, which are a thriving part of youth culture today. The "sub" (부) "character"(캐) is nowadays a major mode of interacting online in South Korean social media and a clear result of digital media cultures that nowadays house different parts of identities for specific kinds of social uses through identity separation. This research uses "photo-sartorial elicitation", a structured interaction and means of gathering social data by having a model and photographer interact around clothing in a way that reveals previously hidden or non-obvious social facts about that person or even a community. I am able to engender participation around a photographic project since photographs on Instagram are the prime social currency within digital subcultures on Instagram, with "exchange rates" for participation in front of the camera far higher than even direct payments of fiscal currency might provide. In the end, it is only by being able to answer the questions, "Why are you here?" and "What do I get out of participation as a subject?" that one can gain the ability to reach into the depths of social phenomena that are otherwise largely impenetrable to the researcher's gaze.

Asian Qualitative Inquiry Association, Dec 31, 2022

Asian Qualitative Inquiry Journal, Vol. 1(2), 113-124, 2022

Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, 2017

Unlike traditional Chinese tourists who seem content to sightsee the city of Seoul as a site of m... more Unlike traditional Chinese tourists who seem content to sightsee the city of Seoul as a site of many toured objects, there is a sizeable number of tourists from China who actively engage in the much more participatory act of finding trendy Korean clothing, wearing it, and experiencing Korea as an apparent Korean. The act of passing - no matter how superficially - as a Korean seems to add quite a bit of “existential authenticity” to the tourism experience in Korea. Ning Wang (1999) provides a lot of the theoretical undergirding for this paper in his explication of what he calls "existential authenticity" in tourism studies. In observing and interacting with young subjects as a street photographer in Seoul, I have increasingly come into contact with seemingly Korean subjects around popular tourist sites who turn out to be Chinese nationals merely in Korean dress. This study uses ethnographic interviews with and portraits of Chinese tourists in Korea who dress and pass as Koreans the as not mere illustration of this phenomenon, but a source of ethnographic data itself. This article is designed as a methodological screed of sorts, and will grapple with the apparent methodological conflict between photojournalistic practices and more traditional uses of photography in academic ethnography. The crux of the methodological question is how to mitigate two different kinds of photographic practice when dealing with subjects and attempting to represent etic reality. The paper also explores the idiosyncrasies and exigencies of the Korean socio-legal environment, along with the nature of street photography, towards the explication of a more flexible “situational ethics” that is specific to the nature of the documentary work being conducted while adhering to an ethos of “doing no harm.” It will also broach the idea of harnessing the “male gaze,” which, placed into the service of the street photographer armed with the camera as a recording device, becomes a crucial tool in guiding the eye towards crucial instances of gender and identity performance as a key guide towards identifying particular modes of identity representation in ways that traditional sociology does not allow.

Korean Association of Regional Sociology, 2019

As simple as it may sound, “street fashion” is a complex and contested concept, with a more layer... more As simple as it may sound, “street fashion” is a complex and contested concept, with a more layered and complex genealogy than its seemingly simple, colloquial usage in vernacular discourse might tend to belie. Commonly used and understood today, the term “street fashion” refers to the items of clothing that everyday people on the street wear. However, more theoretically argued, “street fashion” is a mediated social practice centered around a particular kind of consumption. In this sense, it is inextricably linked to industrial, productive forces with interests in fostering further consumption. In South Korea, it has developed from a tiny, unnoticed fandom at the fringes of a culture industry field that had enjoyed little international success into one of the most noted events in the international field of fashion, all in less than a decade. Based as it is on the attention gained from the efforts of non-fashion field members possessed of little cultural capital or institutional support, the transformation is quite remarkable.

MARXISM 21, 2018

Over the past couple decades, much ado has been made over Korean pop cultural forms receiving att... more Over the past couple decades, much ado has been made over Korean pop cultural forms receiving attention and critical acclaim outside of Korea. Both the pop culture products and the nationalist, media sensation around them have been lumped together and called a “Korean Wave” (hallyu), and coalesced into a “discursive formation” that makes obvious its place in the Korean national project and the culture industry. But as an actual form of truly popular culture, the “K” in the dominant examples of everything from K-POP to K-Cinema, and K-Everything becomes an increasingly meaningless signifier. This paper considers the singularly successful case of Korean street fashion, which has managed to gain worldwide recognition without (indeed, despite) the presence of state or culture industry actors. The paper explains how and why this form of truly ground-up, organically-formed popular culture came to be so successful within the international field before considering the ramifications of a closer look at a truly unique formation of community, consumption, and identity that started in the streets of Seoul. It also argues that street fashion is uniquely interesting in being successful without the major support of other institutions and culture industry actor and has come to constitute an important part of the hallyu phenomenon, yet actually does not resemble other forms of hallyu in terms of origin, execution, or path of critical reception. 지난 20년간 한국의 팝 문화는 해외에서 많은 관심과 비판을 받았고 그 결과 이와 관련해 여러 현상들이 발생했다. 한국의 문화 상품 결과물들, 민족주의자 와 미디어의 센세이션은 한국 팝 문화를 통칭해 ‘한류’로 부르고 한국의 국가정 책이나 문화 산업에서 중요한 위치를 차지하게 만들었다. 하지만, 진정한 팝 문 화의 실질적인 형태로 볼 때, ‘K-POP’이나 ‘K-Cinema’와 같이 모든 것에 ‘K’를 붙이는 것은 점점 의미 없는 기표가 되고 있다. 이 논문은 한국의 길거리 패션 을 다루는데, 한국의 길거리 패션이 정부나 문화 산업 종사자의 역할 없이 전 세계적인 성공을 거두었다는 점에 주목한다. 특히 서울의 거리에서 시작된 독 특한 공동체와 소비 형태, 정체성의 형성이 국제 문화의 장에서 어떻게 그리고 왜 그렇게 성공적일 수 있는지를 설명할 것이다. 또한 이 논문은, 길거리 패션 이 아무런 제도적 지원 없이 성공한 한류의 새로운 현상이라는 점, 그럼에도 그 기원이나 실행, 비판적 수용에서 기존의 한류와 전혀 다른 모습을 보였다는 것을 제시한다.

Culture and Empathy: International Journal of Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies, 2019

Author(s): Hurt, Michael William | Advisor(s): Hilden, Patricia P | Abstract: In my dissertation,... more Author(s): Hurt, Michael William | Advisor(s): Hilden, Patricia P | Abstract: In my dissertation, entitled "Hangukinron: The Shape of Korean National Ideology," I identify the key socio-historical factors in the formation of a particular, phenomenological form in modern Korean national ideology, outlining the character and mechanics of a specific type of ideological production that typifies the Korean national mode of thought, which peaked in South Korea between the years 1987-1997, from the time right before the 1988 Seoul Olympics and up to the near-collapse of the Korean economy in 1997. This period was the fullest flowering of an ideology called hangukinron: a popular discourse that posits a logical and obvious relationship between the purity of the Korean race/nation/culture (minjok) and that country's high level of economic success, vestiges of which remain quite viable and visible in the present day.

A Companion to Korean American Studies

As simple as it may sound, ?쐓treet fashion??is a complex and contested concept, with a more layer... more As simple as it may sound, ?쐓treet fashion??is a complex and contested concept, with a more layered and complex genealogy than its seemingly simple,...

The Journal of Culture Contents

무용과 이론, 2019

Street fashion is an embodied and mediated social practice that, like dance, the primary medium o... more Street fashion is an embodied and mediated social practice that, like dance, the primary medium of the exchange of information is the body. At Seoul Fashion Week, street fashion has become a performance of sartorial acts of gender transgression. And when interpreted through Elaine Aston’s notion of feminist theater practice that utilizlizs the Brechtian dramatic tool of Verfremdung (“alienation”) to help the audience form a critical view of a social practice. According to Aston, there are three main forms of embodied, performed “display” in which feminist theater engages as a way of social critique: Over-Display, Under-Display, and Cross-gendered Display. This paper posits an additional one, called Code-Smashing Display, that is part and parcel of a unique form of Astonian, feminist theater practice that occurs within Korean street fashion as it is constructed as cultural text. Code-Smashing Display is the very currency of the socially conscious Verfremdung in which many frequently paepi engage and which seems to help define style within Korean street fashion as a transgressive social practice unto itself.

CULTURE AND EMPATHY , 2019

This article is a theoretically-grounded experiment in social empathy involving a sartorial excha... more This article is a theoretically-grounded experiment in social empathy involving a sartorial exchange between the national dresses of the Korean hanbok and Vietnamese ao dai. They are worn on the “wrong” bodies as a source of sartorial solicitation. The article begins by revisiting Levi-Strauss’s notion of totemic objects as social markers of things “good to think (with)” in cultures and communities that have socially important objects of which their use itself is indicative of certain social values and norms. (Lizardo 2010). Instead of animals as totemic object, it is national dress, totemically understood, that indicates all sort of notions national communities have of themselves both within the national community and outside of it. National dress is explored as deeply hybrid and much more glocally-produced than local. The paper ends by theorizing the mechanism of transference of such subjective feelings as “national soul” which the structure of the clothing itself must work though as an embodied and neurologically-based mechanism. The fact that social messages can be transmitted through clothing in such a reliable and consistent manner also suggests the existence of a sartorial-kinaesthetic empathy hitherto left both untheorized and never applied as a part of understanding the nature of clothing culture, sartorial visuality, and social empathy in social science.

Korean Regional Sociology, 2019

Chat apps are quickly becoming the preferred medium for digital communication in some of the worl... more Chat apps are quickly becoming the preferred medium for digital communication in some of the world’s fastest-growing markets. Global monthly users of the top four chat apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) now exceed those of the top four traditional social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn) (Business Insider Intelligence, 2017). The most popular chat app, WeChat, had 889 million monthly active users as of Q4 2016 (according to Tencent Penguin Intelligence’s 2017 WeChat User Behavior Report [as cited in Brennan, 2017]).

Given these radical shifts, the Institute for the Future (IFTF), with support from the Google News Lab, conducted an ethnographic case study of the chat app news media ecosystem in Korea. The goal was to better understand the role chat apps will play in the creation and propagation of news around the world, highlighting key challenges and opportunities for newsrooms and journalists.

Our study focuses primarily on KakaoTalk, the most popular chat app in South Korea. South Korea has the fastest internet speed in the world (averaging 28.6 Mbps in the first quarter of 2017 [Akamai, 2017]), the highest smartphone ownership rates in the world (Hana, 2016), free access to global media and internet, and high saturation of both indigenous (KakaoTalk) and foreign chat apps, making the country a good indicator where news media are headed both in the region and around the world. We found three key insights for journalists and newsrooms to consider:

1. MILLIONS OF ORDINARY PEOPLE ARE DRIVING THE FLOW OF NEWS THROUGH CHAT APPS, FURTHER EVOLVING THE INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM IN THE DIGITAL WORLD: The flow of information today within chat apps is similar to a massive, virtual version of the children’s game of telephone, in which individuals whisper messages to each other one by one, the final message inevitably differing significantly from the original. The quality of information risks degradation as it’s shared, especially since static screenshots of unknown provenance are a favored medium for everything from sharing news to organizing social meetups and submitting work to a boss. Not only are chat users distributors, they often paraphrase, contextualize, and editorialize news and information, shifting authority from professional journalists to citizens.

2. CHAT APPS ARE CHANGING HOW NEWS IS PRODUCED: Chat apps are prevalent throughout the news production cycle. They are being used as allin- one devices to record, edit, and publish news. Chat apps are also used to build networks of journalists that fact-check stories in real time. Our interviews indicate that chat apps are already helping journalists and newsrooms coordinate news across a more decentralized workforce.

3. CHAT APPS ARE REDEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JOURNALISTS AND READERS AND CREATING NEW MONETIZATION OPPORTUNITIES: While the social nature of chat apps creates significant challenges for newsrooms to engage authentically and maintain their brand, it creates new opportunities for individual journalists to build closer relationships with readers and insert themselves directly into their conversations. In the same way that news production may become deinstitutionalized with the help of machines, chat apps are enabling journalists to become their own distributors and redefine the journalist-reader relationship. With strengthened relationships, new monetization opportunities have emerged such as crowdfunding.

MARXISM 21

Over the past couple decades, much ado has been made over Korean pop cultural forms receiving at... more Over the past couple decades, much ado has been made over Korean pop cultural forms receiving attention and critical acclaim outside of Korea. Both the pop culture products and the nationalist, media sensation around them have been lumped together and called a “Korean Wave” (hallyu), and coalesced into a “discursive formation” that makes obvious its place in the Korean national project and the culture industry. But as an actual form of truly popular culture, the “K” in the dominant examples of everything from K-POP to K-Cinema, and K-Everything becomes an increasingly meaningless signifier. This paper considers the singularly successful case of Korean street fashion, which has managed to gain worldwide recognition without (indeed, despite) the presence of state or culture industry actors. The paper explains how and why this form of truly ground-up, organically-formed popular culture came to be so successful within the international field before considering the ramifications of a closer look at a truly unique formation of community, consumption, and identity that started in the streets of Seoul. It also argues that street fashion is uniquely interesting in being successful without the major support of other institutions and culture industry actor and has come to constitute an important part of the hallyu phenomenon, yet actually does not resemble other forms of hallyu in terms of origin, execution, or path of critical reception.

지난 20년간 한국의 팝 문화는 해외에서 많은 관심과 비판을 받았고 그 결과 이와 관련해 여러 현상들이 발생했다. 한국의 문화 상품 결과물들, 민족주의자 와 미디어의 센세이션은 한국 팝 문화를 통칭해 ‘한류’로 부르고 한국의 국가정 책이나 문화 산업에서 중요한 위치를 차지하게 만들었다. 하지만, 진정한 팝 문 화의 실질적인 형태로 볼 때, ‘K-POP’이나 ‘K-Cinema’와 같이 모든 것에 ‘K’를 붙이는 것은 점점 의미 없는 기표가 되고 있다. 이 논문은 한국의 길거리 패션 을 다루는데, 한국의 길거리 패션이 정부나 문화 산업 종사자의 역할 없이 전 세계적인 성공을 거두었다는 점에 주목한다. 특히 서울의 거리에서 시작된 독 특한 공동체와 소비 형태, 정체성의 형성이 국제 문화의 장에서 어떻게 그리고 왜 그렇게 성공적일 수 있는지를 설명할 것이다. 또한 이 논문은, 길거리 패션 이 아무런 제도적 지원 없이 성공한 한류의 새로운 현상이라는 점, 그럼에도 그 기원이나 실행, 비판적 수용에서 기존의 한류와 전혀 다른 모습을 보였다는 것을 제시한다.

Asian Qualitative Inquiry Association, Dec 31, 2022

Asian Qualitative Inquiry Journal, Vol. 1(2), 113-124, 2022

Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, 2017

Korean Association of Regional Sociology, 2019

MARXISM 21, 2018

Culture and Empathy: International Journal of Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies, 2019

A Companion to Korean American Studies

The Journal of Culture Contents

무용과 이론, 2019

CULTURE AND EMPATHY , 2019

Korean Regional Sociology, 2019

MARXISM 21

KSAA Korea Studies Association of Australasia (KSAA) COnference Presentation, 2019

Despite the seeming sexiness of the subject and title, this is actually a pretty theoretically wo... more Despite the seeming sexiness of the subject and title, this is actually a pretty theoretically wonkish presentation. It asks the question of what society “does” with women’s bodies, and how it considers them socially, as well as how we, as social investigators (more specifically, ethnographers) can endeavor to know about and describe certain kinds of social action. This presentation, by the way, doesn’t pretend to have any astounding conclusions, but rather a presentation of an ethnomethodologically revealed lifeworld and the methodological means it required. Let’s be clear — these photos are products of collaborative work done by groups of people engaged in technological work. And this is the time to talk about the theory and methodology that informs what we’re looking at. So it’s time to talk about ETHNOMETHODOLOGY. So we’re not talking about how this model feels about posing, her motivations and her work’s ramifications, but rather the nature of WHY in relation to getting a job done, to doing social actions. It’s like asking a plumber about he she fixes up a leak, as opposed to the social-psychological ramifications and the political economy of leak-fixing. That would be more ETHNOGRAPHY’s job. ETHNOMETHODOLOGY is trying to figure out the rules that constitute the lifeworld of a group, and was posited as a response to the problem posed by the structural-functionalist BIG sociology of a Talcott Parsons, which tends to be interested in how people and groups get plugged into and follow the big rules of society. Howard Garfinkle’s EM looks at things the opposite way, and ideally looks at social action without preset rules, but only seeks to understand the rules that the group uses to make their world WORK, and make their LIFEWORLD make sense, since plumbers do not think about THEORY. Oliver Sacks pioneered CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA). His legendary example is that of the use of the word “HELLO” in conversation. So sometimes even the simple message “HELLO” would seemingly indicate depends on its USE. SO we have the “hello” of “hi”, the “hello” of “is anybody there?” on the phone , and the use of “hello’ as in “helloooo, Mcfly, Helllllooooooo?” And in a similar way, it is easy to think we know what these young women are “saying” in these pics. Of course, EM and CA were roundly hate upon in Sociology, but found avid use in business as user studies, especial yin computer science and system design, and is often called Technomethodology, as a way of studying how technology and social uses overlap. The “message” of these pictures often do not reflect not the conversation everyone else is having. This is not mere “narcissism”, although some of that is there. It is not merely “insecure people looking for attention,” although surely there’s some of that as well. From what I’ve seen and interacted within, they are not “fronts for a new kind of prostitution,” although there’s likely some of that in there, too. These are people who’ve set up an techno-aesthetical economy that pays the bills. The social actions in which these people are engaging. The Instagram product is almost always a lie — it masks the work that went into it, even (and especially) when a LOT of work went into it. As a participant-practitioner, I was able to access a lot of this lifeworld by sharing in their work as a true peer, not an outside, and very socially irrelevant and inherently suspect observer.