The Complexity of Identity Construction for Korean International Undergraduate Students in the United States
2021-08
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The Complexity of Identity Construction for Korean International Undergraduate Students in the United States
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2021-08
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The research perspectives on international students’ experiences have been limited. Most research tend to essentialize the identities, struggles, and experiences of international students in the United States. In particular, Asian international students in the U.S. have been represented as exotic others in research. Such studies tend to selectively rely on cultural binaries of identities. Previous research often propagates a narrative that Asian international students suffered from many adaptational challenges in a foreign country such as the U.S. because of their cultural differences. This representation resulted from making a specific connection between their old tradition and recent challenges. This interpretation misses many contexts of their identity constructions. This dissertation aims to reveal the complexity of identity constructions and disrupt the essentialized representations of Asian international students, especially Korean international students (KIS). To achieve this aim, this study used Hall’s concepts, encoding/decoding, about representation as a primary framework. This study focused on not only dominant representations about KIS as encoding but also KIS’ self-representation of their identities as decoding. There were three main findings about their identity constructions in this study. First, their identities in Korea and the U.S. had specific relationships. How they were encoded in Korea, such as low achievers, promising English learners, and global sojourner, contributed to the imagination of their identities in the U.S. even though some of them did not match their lived identities in the U.S. Second, they experienced the differences of identity representations between Korea and the U.S. In Korea, a dominant discourse, 학벌주의 [hakbeoljui meaning critical emphasis on the university hierarchy] played a critical role to define KIS’ identities while race/ethnicity predominantly affected the representations of their identities in the U.S. Finally, they sought comfortable spaces for their identity constructions. KIS decided to move to the U.S. to avoid negative identity representations and/or achieve positive identity representations. Dominant discourses about their identities in Korea, such as academic achievement and English, contributed to their experiences of educational and social hierarchies. Thus, KIS began to recognize the possibilities for their more positive identities in the U.S. They found more comfortable spaces for their positive identity representations in the U.S., including Korean student music club, International Student Representative, student advising job, and Korean language and culture consultant while experiencing the separations and hierarchies in the U.S. The broad contexts of research participants’ stories across two countries led to the ‘layered and sutured’ complexity of their identity constructions.
This study contributes to overcoming the essentialized perspectives on KIS’ identities in previous studies. In particular, this dissertation maintained that KIS’ identities were flexibly constructed by the interactions between their own agency, personal experiences, and dominant discourses within transnational context, rather than inherently fixed. In addition, they continued to find their own comfortable spaces for their identity constructions despite limitations based on environmental factors, such as dominant discourses and international history between Korea and the U.S.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2021. Major: Education, Curriculum and Instruction. Advisor: Vichet Chhuon. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 181 pages.
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Park, Jungyeol. (2021). The Complexity of Identity Construction for Korean International Undergraduate Students in the United States. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/224995.
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