Gwangju-as-Method

Gwangju-as-Method: A Beginning

For years I’ve been circling around the idea, but never quite naming it: Gwangju-as-Method.

It’s a phrase that started as a whisper in my journals, surfaced during conversations with colleagues, and hovered behind my presentations on Korean concepts like han, jung, tuem, and mung. When I was introduced to frameworks like Asia as Method or Korea as Method, they felt deeply resonant, vital interventions. But something felt missing. Something smaller, more rooted. Closer to my daily life.

I live in Gwangju. Not Seoul, not Busan — Gwangju. A mid-sized, southwestern Korean city with a complicated history of resistance, grief, and community resilience. I’ve been here for over two decades, not just as a visitor, but as a neighbor, a teacher, a witness, a sometimes-stranger and sometimes-sister.

And lately, I’ve started to feel that Gwangju is not just a location I inhabit. It is a way of seeing. A lens. A methodology.

Not a universal one. Not one that seeks to extract or generalize. But a grounded, embodied, responsive way of working — especially as a teacher and learner caught between systems, languages, and identities.

“Gwangju-as-Method” is my invitation — to myself and to others — to explore what it means to think with place rather than just in it. What it means to learn from the long memory of a city scarred by state violence but sustained by neighborhood care, collective rituals, and refusal to forget.

It’s also a way to honor the hybrid positionality many educators live with: those of us who straddle borders, who live and teach across cultures, who speak in borrowed tongues and build belonging through practice rather than bloodline.

As a methodology, Gwangju-as-Method begins with questions like:

  • How does the place where I teach shape how I teach?

  • What histories are held — and hidden — in this land, this school, this community?

  • How do local concepts (like jung, or tuem) offer tools for navigating relationships and power?

  • What can a pedagogy of care, slow noticing, and ritual offer in contrast to the fast, extractive pace of globalized education?

This is not a fully-formed theory. It’s a thread I’m beginning to follow. But I believe it can grow into something useful — for educators seeking more relational, reflective, place-aware practices. For those working in contexts not always centered in educational research. For those who know, in their bones, that method is not just about tools — it’s about orientation, about how we show up.

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