• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.147-170
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• 2011

This paper elucidates the characteristics of transnational adoption, estimates the possibility of beyond-borders identity of transnational adoptees, and tries to analyze Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood in its context. Though it has been regarded as one of the most humanitarian ways of helping orphans and poor children of the world, transnational adoption, a one-way flow of children from poor Asian countries to rich white countries, has been operated under the market logic between countries. Transnational adoptees, who had been abandoned and forced to be taken away from their birth mother, and later, to fulfill the desire of white parents for a perfect family, perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete. Korean transnational adoptees, forced to transcend the borders of nation, culture, and ethnicity, experience racial conflict and alienation in white adoptive family and society. Their diaspora experience of violent dislocation creates frustration and confusion in establishing their identity as a whole being. When they return to Korea to find their birth mother and their true identity, Korean adoptees, however, are faced with other obstructing issues, such as language problem, culture conflict, and maternal nationalism. Finally, Korean transnational adoptees reject Korean nationalism discourse based on blood, and try to redefine themselves as beyond-borders subjectivities with new and fluid identities. Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a transnational adoptee, represents a Korean adopted girl's personal, cultural, and racial conflict within her white adoptive family, and questions the image of benevolent white mother and the myth of multiculturalism. The novel further represents Jane's return to Korea to find out her true identity, and shows Jane's disappointment and alienation in her birth country due to her ignorance of language and culture. Returning to USA again, and trying to be reconciled with her American mother, Jane shows the promise of accepting her new identity capable of transcending the borders, and thus, the possibility of enlarging the category of belonging.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.78-86
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• 2011

The world is suffered from severe environmental problems such as climate change and global warming due to radical industrialization after the Industrial Revolution. With advancement of science and information technologies, national borders have become meaningless. In this global trend, movable exhibition shall be supposed to pursue "Local in Global." Thus, movable exhibition should get involved in an effort to find a cultural identity in the globalization and to better our position among the various cultures. As an alternative, movable exhibition can be established by combining biomimicry, which is biomimicry of life by imitating biological system, with Flexibility of movable space. By providing a hint to environmental problems and cultural uncertainty, this alternative will generate an advanced exhibition trend that is more environmental-friendly and more efficient. As a cumulative concept created by the nature for 3.8 billion years, biomimicry has evolved a lot more than the modern science. By catching this point, "A study on flexibility of movable exhibition through biomimicry notion" is providing a revolutionary paradigm stepping beyond the current exhibition trend, which pursues coexistence of human beings and the nature and, at the same time, introduces our culture.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.618-630
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• 2015

This study is to try to find citizenship needed in the age of glocalization and its implication for geography education. With formation of nation-state after modern, the rights and duties are applied to members of a state in a given territory. But Although states grant de jure citizenship, identity as a citizen is increasingly seen as something that is gained beyond and below the state. Citizenship might be conceived as relational rather than absolute, something that is constituted by its connections or network with different people and places rather than something defined by the borders of the nation-state. New space of citizenship has multiple dimension, and is fluid, mobile, multidimensional, transnational, negotiative. Citizenship operates in an increasingly complex web of overlapping spaces, and is reconceptualized as multiple citizenship based on multiscale. Citizenship should now be thought of as multi-level, reflecting individuals simultaneous membership of political communities at a variety of spatial scales and perhaps of non-territorial social groups. Thus, Citizenship education through geography should focus more on interconnected and layered multiple citizenship than bounded national citizenship.