Table of Contents
About
Research
creative
Translation
Remembering a Landfill: Grief, Memory, and the Politics of Waste at Nanjido Landfill
Shaping Futures: East Asia as Practice, Society of East Asian Anthropology (American Anthropological Association) and Seoul National University Department of Anthropology 2025 Conference, Jul 14–16, 2025.
© Gwangmo Choi
abstract
Landfills serve as the final destination for both material and affective residues of life, discarded and relegated to obscurity. Landfills, therefore, function as sites of forgetting, brought into (non)existence by a complex interaction of governance, engineering, and social value systems. This study focuses on the Nanjido landfill in Seoul, South Korea, now transformed into an ecological park, examining it as a site where the act of forgetting is contested. In the aftermath of the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse, which claimed over 500 lives, debris from the disaster—including rubble, human remains, and personal belongings—was deposited at the Nanjido landfill. I examine the excavation and forensic efforts undertaken at Nanjido landfill, where bereaved families and authorities sifted through the layers of discarded material to recover the remains of the disaster victims. Through these practices of recovery that bring together post-disaster grief and memory, the Nanjido landfill emerges as a site where remembrance and forgetting, discarding, and recovery are redefined and renegotiated. I focus on how the relationship between bodies, waste, memory, and governance is reframed through these recovery practices, shaping the ways we encounter and engage with sites of trauma and loss. Ultimately, I ask not only how we choose to remember disaster through such processes but also how we might reconnect with the places and events society chooses to forget.
Entangled Biosecurity: Leprosy, COVID-19, and Foot and Mouth Disease in South Korea
PRAXIS, American Anthropological Association 2024 Annual Meeting, Nov 20–23, 2024.
© SOOAH KWAK
abstract *Edited*
This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022 in Wanggung, a former leprosy settlement village in South Korea, to examine three intersecting modes of preventative health as they apply to human and non-human lives. Originally established to isolate and manage people affected by leprosy, Wanggung became a site where pig farming was promoted as a means of economic self-sufficiency and minimal external contact. Despite the repeal of quarantine laws in the 1990s, farming practices persisted, creating a unique environment where human and animal health intersect. Focusing on the overlapping presence of leprosy, COVID-19, and foot-and-mouth disease, this study traces how each disease prompts distinct yet interconnected responses—quarantine, vaccination, sterilization, and mass culling. Biosecurity measures, once designed to confine disease within the village, have been inverted to guard against external threats. By exploring these shifting dynamics, this study illuminates the more-than-human biopolitics of modern and contemporary Korea and investigates how disease management strategies reinforce and reconfigure boundaries between species, bodies, and communities.
Recycled Places: The Journey of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space from Squat to Museum
Encountering Transition, International Council of Museums ICAMT 50th Annual Conference, Oct 6–10, 2024.
© John Penly
abstract
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) is a small community museum that chronicles the rich history of community resilience of the Lower East Side Manhattan. Following the economic stagnation in the 1970s, many buildings that were seized by the city for nonpayment of taxes were left vacant. Squatters reclaimed these tenements, and after multiple attempts of forced eviction and resistance, the city offered to legalize the occupation. Squatters of C-Squat collectively decided to rent out the first-floor storefront, which now houses MoRUS. While transforming the squat into a museum, certain parts such as walls with murals were preserved, while other elements were thoughtfully recycled and repurposed. Through a broad contour of the making of MoRUS from C-Squat, this study aims to suggest a more holistic approach to sustainable urban heritage conservation.
Museums, Virtual Technology, and Interpretation: Rethinking the 1988 Seoul Olympics in the VR Museum
Transnational Memory Practices in the UK and South Korea: Ethics, Evaluation and Learning in Digital Exhibitions, ESRC Workshop between University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, National Museums Liverpool, and the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Jun 22–24, 2022.
© Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
abstract
This paper investigates how virtual reality (VR) technologies in museums can provoke epistemological and ethical shifts—not through seamless immersion, but through the glitches, software bugs, and breakdowns that interrupt it. These moments of technological failure reveal the constructed nature of historical narratives and open space for users to question curatorial authority and explore alternative modes of engagement. Through comparative case studies of physical and its virtual exhibition archive counterparts, this study examines how museums can use VR not just to replicate museum spaces, but to critically reframe them. Supported by literature in feminist epistemology, digital humanities, and museum anthropology, the study draws from the work of Donna Haraway, Johanna Drucker, Lucy Suchman, and Susan Leigh Star, to argue that embracing technological instability can foster more inclusive, situated, and self-reflexive curatorial practices.