Jessie Von Ryker-Crawford (Anthropology, PhD, Committee Member)
Bonnie Tilland (Anthropology, PhD, Committee Member)
I am a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology currently in the field in Jeonju, South Korea (funded by a Fulbright-Hays dissertation fellowship). My research explores changing notions of kinship and family, national and regional identity, and televisual citizenship in a provincial Korean city. I am interested in how families navigate child rearing, the education system, and other aspects of family life in the midst of rapid shifts in family law and family ideals. I am also interested in how understandings of family values relate to national identity and regionalism, given the Seoul-centrism of Korean society. I am using South Korean television dramas as an ethnographic method to explore affective connections between nation and family. My dissertation is tentatively titled: “Dramatic Restructuring: The Staging of Family Values and National Identity in a South Korean City.” I will be doing fieldwork for this project until September 2011, affiliated with Chonbuk National University. I received a MA in Korea Studies from the University of Washington, and a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Lawrence University.