[KS] Professor Kang Nae-hui's talk at Columbia Univ, 4/25

[Cheehyung Kim]

Professor Kan Nae-hui (of Chungang Univ. and currently visiting
scholar at Cornell Univ.) will be giving a talk at Columbia Univ.
on Tuesday 4/25. It is open to everyone. Information about the talk
(including an abstract) is below.

“The Korea-U.S. FTA: Neoliberalism, Culture, and Democracy in South
Korea.”

Kang Nae-hui, Professor, Chungang University, Korea
Visiting Professor, Cornell University
Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 4:00p - 6:00p
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University

This talk will focus on how the recently started attempt to
negotiate for a Free Trade Agreement between South Korea and the
United States will bear upon the way neoliberalism dominates in
South Korea. Neoliberalism has been inflicting Korean society as a
dominant strategy of capital accumulation for more than two
decades, but the FTA is expected to intensify the country’s
neoliberalization even further. Given that the trade agreement will
certainly devastate the national economy and public culture, one
wonders why the Korean government that claims to be democratic
pursues it so stubbornly. Is it because there is a fundamental
difference between political and real social democracy? To
understand this question, this talk looks into the ways in which
relationships among politics, the economy, and culture are
reformulated in South Korea today.