Diverse Connectivity
Prof. Gui-woo Lee (left) and her colleague, Prof. Min Kayoung.
When students at Seoul Women’s University (SWU) broaden their perspective from Korean women to Asian women, they encounter new possibilities for understanding the impacts of globalization and for serving as peacemakers. That idea guided Dr. Gui-woo Lee as she and her colleagues designed the elective course “Women for Trans-Asian Peace,” with the support of a United Board grant. “This course is based on gender perspective,” Dr. Lee said. “However, we made it a peace education course in order to deal with the much wider range of problems and situations that arise from global connectivity across national borders.”
Globalization’s impact extends far beyond economic indicators: in Korea, it also is seen in the increase in international marriages and in “global split families,” where one spouse lives and works in another country. With these changes, tensions between countries can become potential sources of family strain or, conversely, episodes of domestic violence in international marriages can disrupt peaceful foreign relations. That creates a role for higher education, Dr. Lee finds. “We think we are in an important position to educate and train people as transnational peace mediators.”
SWU students in India for global service-learning.
Building awareness is a first step. Course lectures and extracurricular discussions focused on topics like changing family dynamics in Asia, the demand for “fast fashion” and its impact on female workers in low-income Asian countries, immigrant wives and women’s rights, and tourism. The transnational elements often were new to the students, but over time, Dr. Lee believes, being able to see the “diverse connectivity across national boundaries” might motivate them to “create cooperation in many aspects between countries.”
Globalization can produce fertile ground for understanding. “Unlike previous generations, young Asian students of today are quick to form a rapport with their peers from different countries,” Dr. Lee said. For example, South Korean pop culture reaches far across Asia, and this “Korean wave” or hallyu creates bonds of shared interest. Korean universities host an increasing number of students from other Asian countries, and this, according to Dr. Lee, means that “the trans-Asia peace model has great potential as a leading university curriculum during this era of globalization.”
Dr. Lee and her colleagues already see the impact of their course. An international service-learning component connected the SWU students with women in India and Vietnam. Through discussions, the young peacemakers-in-training realized these Indian and Vietnamese women are not recipients of aid but “colleagues with whom they should seek to identify common contexts and work with in close solidarity.”
(First published in Horizons, June 2015)