Reimagining citizenship in unification education : the discursive formation of naturalized citizens in a divided Korea

In South Korea, unification education aims to promote a united Korean nation in opposition to the division of the Korean Peninsula. The concept of citizen in this national community is frequently assumed to be that of a native-born ethnic Korean, which in turn advances the ongoing legacies of ethnonationalism. In this study, I aim to illustrate the experiences and thoughts of naturalized Korean citizens to expand the concept of citizenship in unification education. Drawing on theoretical perspectives that understand citizenship as lived experience rather than normative practice, I employ Gee’s discourse analysis to examine how unification education policies, reference books, and school textbooks have conceptualized citizenship. Moreover, to complement the textual dimension of citizenship, I explore naturalized citizens’ understanding of their positions in society and their positionings in relation to Korean unification based on an analysis of data from semi-structured in-depth interviews. The document analysis reveals that unification education texts construct specific citizenship forms, favouring law-abiding, vigilant, native Korean and global citizens. In this textual dimension, migrants are mainly portrayed as marriage immigrants and foreign workers, losing sight of their potential citizenship and that of Korean citizens from non-native backgrounds. The interview analysis further uncovers symbolic, struggling, expanding, and spatial-affective aspects of lived citizenship. While crossing these dimensions, naturalized citizens understand their positions as foreigners out of unrecognized citizenship, Korean citizens out of democratic citizenship, and international citizens out of in-between citizenship. Specifically, naturalized citizens’ overall civic positions dynamically pertain to two orientations—distancing and bridging. Unrecognized citizenship concerns their distance from structural, symbolic, and interpersonal integration into society. Democratic citizenship, on the other hand, allows them to be more connected to political and community-based decisions and initiatives. Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions between the two Koreas lead naturalized citizens to dwell on in-between citizenship, as their international positions both distance them from and bridge them to the possibility of Korean unification. Based on my understanding of naturalized citizens’ discursive and sociocultural formations of citizenship, I finally outline a nonviolent approach to a unification education curriculum—openness, loose solidarity, and inter-living—to enrich the inclusive and lived citizenship potential of unification education.