The direction of high school choice policy has been one of the notable commitments every time the candidates of the superintendent of Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education makes since the policy was repeatedly repealed and decided to be maintained. During the implementation of the policy, conflicts among policy related groups, such as teachers and parents, affected the decisions of the superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education to alternately repeal and maintain the policy. The purpose of this study was to investigate the perspective gap, roles and influence among two different types of policy actors: teachers, and parents. Through this approach, the study examines the goals and outcomes of the policy, and addresses the success and failure of the policy through the different perceptions of practitioners, and consumers. In order to achieve these goals, this study used a qualitative research method involving thirty-nine teachers and parents. The findings revealed that teachers and parents viewed that there are chronic policy making problems in Korea, which influence the frequent changes made to the high school choice policy. The absence of communication between a policy maker, policy practitioners, and policy consumers, a product of the top down decision making structure in Korea, has led to inefficiency and inflexibility the policy’s implementation and practice. Teachers and parents suggested that they should be able to contribute to policy consistency and successful implementation through early involvement in policy design and development. Understanding each role and exploring the perceptions of policy relevant actors in high school choice policy in Seoul provides a as well as providing for the further related policies. / text

Economic globalization in the 1980s ad 1990s gave birth to a new type of city, called a 'global city', which is assumed to perform critical functions to facilitate the contemporary global economy and which share the same characteristics. Cities, however, have different histories, economies, polities and demographies and these different local conditions do no lend themselves to the construction of a general model a global city even though they have characteristics. First, I explore the historical path of urban development in Seoul since the 1960s. Seoul is very unique in that its economic growth was mainly planned and implemented by the authoritarian Korean national government while civil and political freedom of citizens to participate the decision making process were strongly suppressed. However, the forces of globalization from the 1980s significantly altered the economic and political context in which the Korean state had successful operated in the previous decades. The role of state in regulating and planning the market was significantly weakened as well as the national political system became democratized and decentralized from the 1980s. These changes caused by the forces of globalization have made significant impacts on the organization of urban development in Seoul. Secondly, thus, I examine the social and political impacts of the globalization on the lives of the inhabitants in Seoul and I found that Seoul’s becoming a global city is closely related to the growing gap in the condition of living between the poor and the rich in Seoul. It is mainly caused by the restructuring of the urban labor market toward producer service sector orientation away from manufacturing sector. The expansion of the producer service sector has produced new trends in Seoul’s urban labor market: professionalization of regularly employed people at the top and increasing informal and low-skilled laborers and/or illegal foreign workers at the bottom. Moreover, it is found that increasing social inequality has its spatial consequence: a growing residential segregation. In Seoul, the southeast sub-region has emerged as an exclusive residential area for high-income professionals with much better living conditions, including spacious houses, easier access to heath-care facilities, more green space and educational institutions. The most important cause of the spatial concentration of professionals in this region is the concentration of the producer service sector jobs there. Yet, high price for housing in this area reinforces the clustering of the rich in the area and shuns lower-income people from moving into the area. However, the role of the national government cannot be under-estimated because the government urban policies produced the new development of residential and commercial development in the area in the 1980s. However, it is argued an opportunity to mediate the degrading economic living conditions for citizens in a global city has been created by the same force of globalization, yet in a different social system: urban politics. With particular emphasis on political democratization and decentralization under the current global economic system, it became possible for citizens to be directly involved in the public-policy making process. In theory, this situation implies that citizens are now empowered to create public policies that would minimize the negative consequences of economic globalization on their daily lives. My case study on Cheonggye Stream Restoration Project shows the opportunities and challenges of new urban political context in Seoul. The analysis of the Cheonggye Restoration Project suggests that more room has been created in the course of policy planning and the policy-making process, caused mainly by global political change toward direct democracy. However, the project also suggests that these changes at an institutional level did not lead to changes at an operational level, failing to produce an outcome that really reflects the demands of the actors. / text

In the last fifteen years, conflict resolution, a collaborative, problem-solving approach to social conflicts, was introduced to new democracies in an attempt to develop civil society's capacity for conflict management (Mayer, 2000). Conflict resolution provides people with an opportunity to advocate effectively for their own interests in a non-violent, constructive manner through systematic educational efforts, skills trainings, dialogue initiatives, and mediation practices (Mayer, 2000). It empowers people to address, manage, and transform difficulties and antagonism into a source of positive social change and, thus, change people's negative psychological responses to conflicts (Bush & Folger, 1994). In this view, conflict resolution in new democracies' civil society provides citizens as well NGO practitioners with the skills and opportunities to practice how to express and resolve differences in a safe and constructive environment (Shonholtz, 1997). In an effort to provide additional information about civil society's conflict resolution practices and their affect in new democracies, this dissertation examines the existing efforts of South Korean civil society organisations to promote conflict resolution methodologies. Specifically, three organisations are examined to understand better South Korean civil society's response to PCR issues. Furthermore, by closely examining these three civil society organisations, this dissertation aims to explore what affect increased awareness and engagement in conflict resolution methodologies have on the democratic quality of civil society.

This paper attempts to explore the nature of the online anti-brand communities in South Korea. The current state of the online anti-brand communities is discovered with regards to different kinds of online platforms and the categories of targeted products and services. Case analyses of three popular anti-brand communities were conducted to discover how dissatisfied consumers form a group, interact with other consumers, and generate group actions. Specific details of consumer interactions and collective actions in the online anti-brand communities provide some managerial implications of how to effectively react to the anti-brand movement. / text

In this study, I analyze how recent South Korean cinema has responded to the forces of globalization by appropriating these influences both on and off screen. In particular, by situating Korean blockbuster within its local, regional and global contexts, I highlight the ways in which the identity politics of Korean blockbuster complicate our understanding of globalization and national cinema. The second chapter focuses on the globalization of recent South Korean cinema, with critical attention given to hybridity as an industrial strategy and as shaped by intra-regional co-productions. The third chapter analyzes four Korean films to represent the characteristics of Korean blockbuster and Korean national issues. Through the two primary chapters, I argue that Korean blockbuster is a hybrid form between national cinema and Hollywood blockbusters. It is a local answer to the accelerating forces of globalization at home, evident in the growing direct competition with Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, despite the growing reliance on the big-budget blockbusters, the recent rise in the domestic market share of local films against Hollywood movies owes much to the high-profile success of many of Korean blockbusters. The significance of the case of Korean Cinema is multifaceted in our comprehensive understanding of globalization and hybridity. It illustrates that globalization as hybridization takes place at multiple levels and in multiple directions beyond the conventional global-local paradigm. In noting intra-regional exchanges as integral to the construction of today’s hybridities, my study has contended that regionalization and localization strongly contribute to the globalization process. More important, by locating hybridity outside of Western hegemony in the intraregional cultural dynamic, it also resists the Eurocentric approach that tends to view hybridity as only produced through local appropriation of the global/Hollywood model. This is often implied even in the recognition of hybridity as a resistance against hegemonic power. / text

This thesis traces the history of Conscientious Objection and draft evasion from the introduction of the Universal Male Conscription system in 1949 to the end of the authoritarian dictatorship period in 1993. I especially focus on the persecution and stigmatization of religious Conscientious Objector groups such as the South Korean Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists. The negative labeling of these Conscientious Objectors as social deviants is part of an initiative led by the South Korean state to solidify Universal Male Conscription as a social norm. This process was supported by the implementation of a national surveillance system as well as the intensification of a nation-wide crackdown on draft evasion, which was viewed indifferently from Conscientious Objection. Thus, this project reveals the ostracization of Conscientious Objection as well as the normalization of Universal Male Conscription as an interconnected issue that came to be perpetuated throughout South Korean History.

This thesis traces the history of Conscientious Objection and draft evasion from the introduction of the Universal Male Conscription system in 1949 to the end of the authoritarian dictatorship period in 1993. I especially focus on the persecution and stigmatization of religious Conscientious Objector groups such as the South Korean Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists. The negative labeling of these Conscientious Objectors as social deviants is part of an initiative led by the South Korean state to solidify Universal Male Conscription as a social norm. This process was supported by the implementation of a national surveillance system as well as the intensification of a nation-wide crackdown on draft evasion, which was viewed indifferently from Conscientious Objection. Thus, this project reveals the ostracization of Conscientious Objection as well as the normalization of Universal Male Conscription as an interconnected issue that came to be perpetuated throughout South Korean History.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This project examines the term autopoiesis and contextualizes it into the realm of Landscape Architecture. Autopoiesis is defined as self-generating, self-producing, self-maintaining organization, used to describe the resilience of a living system. This practicum presents autopoiesis as a process condition that describes incidences of phenomena and the resulting emergent behaviors. Through illustration, photography, simulation and experimental studies, an understanding of autopoiesis through visual representations was attained. This practicum creates a space that uses the dynamics of autopoiesis to both inform and form the design of an urban condition. Located along the coast of Incheon, South Korea, a 1.6km2 site of reclaimed tidal-flat land was investigated. Autopoiesis was understood through phenomena and emergent behaviors that resulted by integrating the fluctuating tidal system into the creation, realization and functioning of the site. The intention of this project is to articulate the notions of autopoiesis through the design of a flexible condition that responds, reacts and engages with contingencies and disturbances, allowing these types relationships to become integral component to the overall development and functioning of the designed site.

This dissertation examines the role that animation plays in the formation of transcultural fan communities. A “transcultural fan community” is defined as a group in which members from many national, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds find a sense of connection across difference, engaging with each other through a mutual interest in animation while negotiating the frictions that result from their differing social and historical contexts. The transcultural model acts as an intervention into polarized academic discourses on media globalization which frame animation as either structural neo-imperial domination or as a wellspring of active, resistant readings. Rather than focusing on top-down oppression or bottom-up resistance, this dissertation demonstrates that it is in the intersections and conflicts between different uses of texts that transcultural fan communities are born. The methodologies of this dissertations are drawn from film/media studies, cultural studies, and ethnography. The first two parts employ textual close reading and historical research to show how film animation in the early twentieth century (mainly works by the Fleischer Brothers, Ōfuji Noburō, Walt Disney, and Seo Mitsuyo) and television animation in the late twentieth century (such as The Jetsons, Astro Boy and Cowboy Bebop) depicted and generated nationally and ethnically diverse audiences. Exactly how such diversity was handled varied according to the specific animation producers, distributors, and consumers involved. And yet, all of these cases exemplify models of textual engagement and modes of globalization that have a continuing influence today. Building on the basis of twentieth-century animation, the third part of the dissertation illustrates the risks and potentials that attend media globalization in the Internet era of the early twenty-first century. The web media texts There She Is!! (2003) and Hetalia: Axis Powers (2006) are analyzed alongside results from a survey of animation fans conducted online and at fan events in Canada, the United States, and Japan between July 2009 and September 2010. This dissertation thus demonstrates the different ways of living together in the world generated by the global crossings and clashes of social life and mediated imaginaries today.