scholarly journals Engineering care in pandemic technogovernance: The politics of care in China and South Korea’s COVID-19 tracking apps

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110207
Author(s):  
Youngrim Kim ◽  
Yuchen Chen ◽  
Fan Liang

This article critically examines South Korea and China’s COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience’s understanding of the “politics of care”. Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discursive materials, we demonstrate how the ideological, relational, and material practices of the apps strategically deployed “care” to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance in these two countries. In the ideological dimension, media and state discourse utilized a combination of vilifying and nationalist rhetoric that framed one’s acquiescence to surveillance as a demonstration of national belonging. Meanwhile, the apps also performed ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which contributed to the manufacturing of pseudonormality in these societies. In the end, we argue that the Chinese and South Korean governments managed to frame their aggressive surveillance infrastructure during COVID-19 as a form of paternalistic care by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Jin-Wook Choi ◽  
Jina Bak

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the roots of police corruption, evaluate the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures, and suggest recommendations to prevent and control police corruption in South Korea. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a qualitative approach to identify the key causes and to assess the reform agenda of police corruption in South Korea. In doing so, it introduces a brief history and profile of the police force, explores changes in police corruption, identifies the roots of police corruption, assesses the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures and offers policy recommendations to curb corruption in the South Korean police. Findings This paper claims that conventional and current anti-corruption measures have not been effective in minimizing police corruption in South Korea. It identifies the scope of police work and duties without proper accountability, a code of silence in police organizations, the low ethical standards of police officers and weak punitive measures against corrupt police officers as the main causes of corruption. Strenuous reform efforts that directly target these causes are needed to reduce corruption in the South Korean police. Originality/value This paper will be a useful reference for readers who are interested in why corruption has not been effectively prevented and controlled in the South Korean police.


Author(s):  
Pedro Vinícius Pereira Brites ◽  
Bruna Coelho Jaeger

Since the 1990s, many analysts have sought to explain the differences in development paths between Brazil and South Korea, the latter often being pointed as an example of success. As a highly industrialized economy focused on international trade, the South Korean case stood out as a way of overcoming the backwardness of developing countries. However, there is a need for analysis that point to the specificities of the developmental state in South Korea, whose interventionist action was decisive in leveraging the country’s industrial production in accordance with internal business groups, as well as the geopolitical context favorable to outward-oriented industrialization. The Brazilian process, in turn, due to the wealth of natural resources and the large domestic market, has made the induction of the state in industrialization more artificial, whose policy supposes an element of coercion, induction and control. This research, therefore, seeks to analyze the specific dimensions of each case, highlighting the role of the state and its relationship with the internal bourgeoisie in the construction of an industrial policy. The trajectories of rise and decline of Brazilian and South Korean developmental state will be analyzed, including the current crisis of reconfiguration of political power that both countries are going through.


PeerJ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e8900
Author(s):  
Jee Yun Hyun ◽  
Jang Hyuk Cho ◽  
Puneet Pandey ◽  
Mi-Sook Min ◽  
Kyung Seok Kim ◽  
...  

The leopard, Panthera pardus, is a threatened species in its range throughout the world. Although, historically, the Korean Peninsula had a high population density of leopards, they were extirpated from South Korea by 1970, leaving almost no genetic specimens. Traditionally, Korean leopards are classified as Panthera pardus orientalis; however, their classification is based only on locality and morphology. Therefore, there is a need for genetic studies to identify the phylogenetic status of Korean leopards at the subspecies level. Presently, no extant wild specimen is available from South Korea; therefore, we extracted genetic material from the old skin of a leopard captured in Jirisan, South Korea in the 1930s and conducted the first phylogenetic study of the South Korean leopard. A total of 726 bp of mitochondrial DNA, including segments of the NADH5 and control region, were amplified by PCR. A phylogenetic analysis of the fragment, along with sequences of nine leopard subspecies from GenBank revealed that the extinct South Korean leopard belonged to the Asian leopard group and in the same clade as the Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis). Thus, the leopard that inhabited South Korea in the past was of the same subspecies as the Amur leopard population currently inhabiting the transboundary region of Russia, China, and North Korea. These results emphasize the importance of conserving the endangered wild Amur leopard population (estimated to be about 60–80 individuals) in Russia and China, for future restoration of leopards in the Korean Peninsula.


Author(s):  
Joon Young Song

Although no human case of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) has been documented in South Korea to date, surveillance studies have been conducted to evaluate the prevalence of tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) in wild ticks.


Author(s):  
Anne Weissenstein

We present an update on infection prevention and control for COVID-19 in healthcare settings. This update focuses on measures to be applied in settings with increasing community transmission, growing demand for concern about COVID-19 patients, and subsequent staffing issues in the event of shortages of personal protective equipment for healthcare facilities worldwide. The comfort and emotional resilience of health care workers are key components in maintaining essential health care services during the COVID-19 virus (coronavirus) outbreak.


Author(s):  
Minjeong Kim

With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.


2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 737-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Maman

This paper examines the emergence of business groups in Israel and South Korea. The paper questions how, in very different institutional contexts, similar economic organizations emerged. In contrast to the political, cultural and market perspectives, the comparative institutional analysis adopted in this research suggests that one factor alone could not explain the emergence of business groups. In Israel and South Korea, business groups emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, and there are common factors underlying their formation: state-society relations, the roles and beliefs of the elites, and the relative absence of multinational corporations in the economy. To a large extent, the chaebol are the result of an intended creation of the South Korean state, whereas the Israeli business groups are the outcome of state policies in the economic realm. In both countries, the state elite held a developmental ideology, did not rely on market forces for economic development, and had a desire for greater economic and military self-sufficiency. In addition, both states were recipients of large grants and loans from other countries, which made them less dependent on direct foreign investments. As a result, the emerging groups were protected from the intense competition of multinational corporations.


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