[KS] AAS Korea panels announcements

[jrpking]

> I did not think my advertisement of the record number of Korea panels 
> at the AAS
> was going to start a debate on the lack of social scientists presentations in
> the Korea field.

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