Please register for this event! (registration page)
The Institute for Asian Studies welcomes Friends of Korea (FoK), a national nonprofit that fosters cultural awareness and friendship between Americans and Koreans. Learn more at the Friends of Korea website.
This is a great opportunity to meet people with ties and interests with Korean culture, language, and communities of Oregon! Feel free to arrive at any time. Refreshments will be provided!
Membership meeting 3:00 - 3:30 pm (Pacific Time) - open to all
We will hold the business meeting of Friends of Korea before the general meeting. The agenda will include an update on the recent activities and on FoK's financial health, as well as other developments.
Annual meeting 3:30 to 5:15pm (Pacific Time) - open to all
The keynote lecture - "Multicultural Society in Korea" - a talk by Dr. Hyeyoung Woo, Professor of Sociology at Portland State University.
Presentation of 2023 Kevin O'Donnell Award
Presentation of the 2023 Giving Back Initiative
About the Keynote Lecture: Multicultural families, those in which one or both spouses is of a different ethnic or cultural background from mono-cultural Korean, are becoming a larger proportion of families in South Korea. In this talk, Hyeyoung Woo will briefly overview immigration history in Korea and examine current profiles of immigrants and their families along with the government’s immigration policies. Then, she will examine immigrants’ identities, need for political representation, their fights through the court system, and the issues and aspirations of second-generation immigrants. By doing so, this talk will extend the current understanding about multicultural families in Korea and propose directions for contemporary struggles over multiculturalism, gender relations, and immigrants’ identity.
About the Keynote Speaker: Hyeyoung Woo is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Asian Studies at Portland State University. She has published a number of papers looking at family behaviors, social attainment, and gender relations and their associations to health over the life course, and is Co-Editor of two edited volumes: Korean Families Yesterday and Today (2020, University of Michigan Press), and Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea (2022, Rutgers University Press). Her current project on the lives of women in Korea (funded by the Academy of Korean Studies) takes a comprehensive approach to understand the issues around work and family, marriage and parenting, and sexuality and intimacy among women across the generations.