So Jin Park

I am currently a Ph. D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology and a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow (June 2004 - May 2005). I also earned a Graduate minor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. My in-progress dissertation, “The Retreat from Public Schooling: South Korean Mothers’ Management of the Private After-School Educational Market,” examines mothers’ management of their children’s private after-school education to reveal the workings of both social inequality and ideologies of motherhood. Supported by the Asian Research Fund and Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant (UIUC), I conducted my ethnographic research in a moment of intense neo-liberal educational reform and amidst an escalating public discourses on the “crisis of education.” The enormous private after-school market challenged South Korea’s decades-long “school equalization policy” and the popular idea of “educational equality.” In the dissertation, I argue that this education economy has produced “educational manager mothers,” namely women whose “class work” happens through their activities for their children’s education. My thesis argues that while all mothers are anxious about their children’s futures in our ever- changing world, differences of economic, cultural, and social capital make for very real distinctions in educational strategies and management. My dissertation thus offers an anthropological perspective on the complex articulation of class and gender amidst the privatization and globalization of education. I will defend my dissertation in May 2005. I am currently looking for an academic job in diverse disciplines -- anthropology, East Asian studies, women’s studies and even international/comparative education programs.

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