Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers

June Hee Kwon

July 24, 2026 (Friday)/ 17:30-19:00

Room 301, 3F, Building 10,

Sophia University

In person only

No prior registration required

Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke University Press, 2023), examines how Korean Chinese workers' collective aspiration for the "Korean Dream"

emerged at the intersection of post-socialist China and post-Cold War South Korea. This book argues that this aspiration was not merely an individual desire for upward mobility, but a

historically situated project that reconfigured class, ethnicity, and gender across shifting national and ideological terrain. Using bodies, money, and time as analytical lenses, Borderland

Dreams reveals how Korean diasporic lives are enacted, negotiated, and contested across

competing national imaginaries - the fading promise of the Korean Dream and the emergent

pull of the China Dream - within uneven horizon of mobilities.

June Hee Kwon is Associate Professor in the Asian Studies Program at California State

University, Sacramento. She is the author of Borderland Dream: The Transnational Lives of

Korean Chinese Workers (Duke University Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Francis H. K. Hsu

Book Award from the Society for East Asian Anthropology. She is currently developing a new

book project, Frontier Fruits: The Social Power of Citrus Trees in Jeju, Korea, which examines

how the transnational mobilities of citrus trees—particularly between Jeju and Japan—have

reorganized ecologies, economies, and farmers' aspirations within Cold War political economy

and geopolitics.

This talk is organized by Kim Dodom (Assistant Professor, Sophia University).