[KS] AAS Korea panels announcements

[Sungdai Cho]

I agree with the fact (Ross mentioned) that there are not much going 
on Korean linguistics and language pedagogy in AAS.  What motivates 
to go to AAS, besides meeting people from other discipline?  Or this 
is the right time to start off the roundtable for Korean language 
pedagogy from different perspectives.  But I simply don't know how to 
do it.  I am not representing AATK, ICKL, IAKLE, but I wished to add 
their function in AAS to exchange the ideas under the name of Korean 
Studies.

Best,

Sundy



>
>
>Like Mike Robinson, I, too, served on the AAS Program Committee 
>recently, and can confirm that the Program Committee usually bends 
>over backwards to encourage social science paper and panel proposals 
>-- but there just aren't that many, and often they're just not very 
>interesting (and when I was on the committee, we had a political 
>scientist from the Japan side vetting the Japan and Korean 
>proposals, so it wasn't just humanities types making that judgement).
>
>Another point worth making, in light of Hyung Il Pai's comments 
>about the availability of alternative, specialized venues for, say, 
>the political scientists, and Ed Rockstein's comment that back in 
>the 70s it was all literature, linguistics and history, is that 
>since the mid- to late 1980s language and linguistics has also all 
>but disappeared from the AAS, and especially so for Korean. There is 
>always a token panel or roundtable on Japanese and Chinese language 
>pedagogy, but rarely much on Korean language pedagogy or linguistics.
>
>Here, too, there has been a rash of new 'international' 
>organizations since the 1980s dedicated (in theory) to different 
>types of 'Korean' linguistics -- IAKLE, ICKL, and AATK are only 
>three obvious venues (in practice, there isn't much traffic 
>control). IAKLE and ICKL tend to have well-funded annual conferences 
>hosted at different exotic locations every year, and there are yet 
>others -- the annual Harvard Workshop on Korean Linguistics (now an 
>almost obligatory rite de passage, it would seem, for grad students 
>from Korea wanting to beef up their CVs with the 'Harvard' cachet), 
>the Korean Bilingualism Society, etc.
>
>Add to all this the fact that most of what gets called 'linguistics' 
>these days -- as 'linguistics' continues its efforts to constitute 
>itself as an independent, autonomous field and above all to define 
>itself as a 'science' by systematically excluding from its purview 
>just about everything that makes language interesting for the study 
>of history, society, politics and culture -- has little or nothing 
>to do with understanding Korea and contributes little to 'area 
>studies' (however one understands this), so it is small wonder (and, 
>in my view, no great loss) that very little 'linguistics' appears on 
>AAS programs these days.
>
>Another factor mitigating against going to AAS is money/funding. Now 
>that 'Korean as a Foreign Language' has become a boom field in Korea 
>itself, the language pedagogues have plenty of their own venues to 
>go to, all rather richly funded. Why waste money attending AAS? The 
>Korean Studies field as a whole might want to try, though, to find 
>ways to encourage more graduate students to attend AAS meetings -- 
>something I hope to raise at our CKS meeting next week.
>
>Anyway, even those types of linguistics that have broader relevance 
>to understanding Korea (historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, 
>sociology of language, writing system stuff, and of course pedagogy) 
>now have plenty of other venues to choose from.
>
>So it seems we're in for increasing specialization in conference 
>venues, and less variety at AAS?
>
>
>Cheers,
>
>
>
>--
>Ross King
>Associate Professor of Korean, University of British Columbia
>and
>Dean, Korean Language Village, Concordia Language Villages


-- 
                  Sungdai Cho
              Associate Professor
           Korean and Linguistics
Department of German, Russian and East Asian Languages
              SUNY at Binghamton
           Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
           607-777-3950, 777-2658 (f)
  http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~sundy