Since 2003, EUI (which I co-founded and co-direct) has provided an innovative approach to teaching and learning focused on promoting student research on universities and colleges.
In EUI-affiliated courses, students use a variety of ethnographic, archival, and related methods to examine the university in its broader social, political, and historical contexts. Students in EUI-affiliated courses, which are capped at 25 students, work through an online environment to record their research process and findings; at the end of the semester they have the opportunity to contribute their work to the EUI digital archives of student research which is nested in the UIUC’s digital repository,
IDEALS. Today the EUI collection is over 1,000 entries-strong and is one of IDEALS’ most-used archives, with over 275,000 downloads of student research since 2005. Through workshops, customized web environments, IRB permissions, and a bi-annual student conference, EUI works with faculty from varying disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to assist them in effectively incorporating student research on universities and colleges into their courses. Faculty may modify an existing course or develop a new course that includes an EUI component.
The Korean Family in Comparative Perspective (KFCP) is a “Laboratory for the Globalization of Korean Studies” funded by a generous grant by the Academy of Korean Studies.
The KFCP Lab aims to bring the Korean family to the center of comparative studies, with the conviction that boldly comparative work has the potential to draw attention to Korean studies. Many family-related developments in South Korea are ripe for comparative analysis, including the rise of so-called multicultural families, the escalation of transnational split families, important legal changes such as the repeal of the household registration system, precipitous fertility decline, and dramatic increases in the rate of divorce. We ambitiously hope to set the intellectual course for the examination of the Korean family in its comparative regional and cultural contexts both within and beyond East Asia.
I co-direct the American University Meets the Pacific Century Laboratory (with colleagues Soo Ah Kwon, Tim Liao, and Adrienne Lo), an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
AUPC includes faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates. AUPC broadly examines the internationalization of the undergraduate student body at UIUC, the U.S. public university today with the largest number of international undergraduate students. Over the course of AUPC research, it became clear that the rapid growth of the international undergraduate population is exposing the tensions between national understandings of racial discourses and the desire of the university to prepare its students for global futures. Currently we are planning a co-authored book on the topic.
