9-18-25 – Development, Dispossession, and Desires in Jeju with Youjeong Oh


Thursday, September 18, 2025
4pm-5:30pm
75 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

Jeju is known as a popular international tourist destination, a filming location for K-dramas, an Instagrammable hotspot, and a site of trendy lifestyle experiments. Yet behind these images of paradise, pristine nature, and healing lie histories of forced development and dispossession. Highlighting diverse forms of activism, this presentation conveys the vivid and urgent voices of Jeju residents as they resist the extractive, predatory, and colonial dimensions of development.

Youjeong Oh is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (Cornell, 2018), explores how Korean municipalities have used Korean TV dramas and K-pop music in their placeand tourism promotion. Her current research is about (over)development, dispossession, and desires in Jeju. Her other research interests include urban social movements, colonization through development, decolonization, indigenous resurgence, and media, tourism, and place in East Asia. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Tourism Geographies, Media, Culture & Society, and the Journal of Korean Studies. She received a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley. (From AAS NEAC DSB Korea website.)

This talk is presented to you by the BU Center for the Study of Asia, BU Initiative on Cities, and CAS World Languages and Literatures Department with financial assistance from the Korea Foundation through the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council Distinguished Speakers Bureau-Korea grant.