Ways of Living in the Context of Globalization: How South Korean Minority Adolescents Construct Their Identities.

This study examines how two Korean adolescents, born in transnational marriage families, construct their identities in the context of globalization. The data used comes from a yearlong ethnographic research project that includes fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and additional artifacts. The findings reveal that Tayo and Sungho navigate through linguistically, culturally, and discursively hybridized social spaces. Encountering the ideology of a monoethnic, monolingual, and monocultural Korea, they suffer from pervasive social stigmatization of their heterogeneity. Yet over time, the two focal adolescents become critical social agents who understand intersubjective dynamics and use linguistic and cultural resources to re-imagine themselves in more symbolically powerful ways. The findings of this study capture the dialectic interaction between the global and the local. They urge researchers to focus further on the complexity, multiplicity, and fluidity of one's identity and to dig deeper into the lives of minority children.