Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it shows how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of what makes “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts. Junehui Ahn details the conflicting and competing ways in which the ideologies of new personhood are enacted in actual everyday socialization contexts and reveals the confusions, dilemmas, and ruptures that occur when globally dominant ideals of childhood development are superimposed onto local experiences. Between Self and Community pays special attention to the way children, as active agents of socialization, create, construe, and sustain their own meanings of their personhood, thereby highlighting the dynamism children and their culturally rich peer world create in South Korea’s shifting socialization terrain.  

JUNEHUI AHN is professor of urban sociology at the University of Seoul in South Korea. This is her first book.
 

"What does it mean to be a 'good child' today in a globally influenced society?  Ahn tackles this intriguing question through the eyes and mouths of young children and teachers in a South Korean preschool. She reveals how children navigate peer relationships, influence their teachers' pedagogical approaches, and redefine expectations. Ahn encourages us to reflect on and recalibrate our own expectations of children and childhood in an ever-changing, global environment."
 — Barbra A. Meek, author of We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Co

“[Between Self and Community by Junehui Ahn] is a timely addition to the scholarly conversation on Korean children's new personhood....Ahn's findings meaningfully speak to anyone interested in socialisation, globalisation and childhood studies.”— Children & Society

"Junehui Ahn once again establishes herself as one of the pre-eminent chroniclers of children’s lives. Her delicate and lucid ethnography closely documents how Korean preschoolers actively contribute to their own socialization. As striking is her compelling demonstration of how these children deftly mediate between local values and a new, globalized vision of personhood." — Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, author of Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds