• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.181-203
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• 2011

Transformation towards multicultural society requires discussion on new concepts of citizenship which would overcome some limits of national citizenship developed on the basis of the nation-state. Citizenship can be defined as a relationship between individuals and their community, and conceptualized in a relation with identity. Citizenship also includes its spatial elements such as site and movement, place and public/private space, boundary and territory, flow and network, level and scale, etc. and in particular implies a multi-scalability of local, national, and global level. A new discussion on citizenship has emerged in Japan in shift to multicultural society, especially focusing on activities of local governments and grassroots social movements to support and ensure welfare services to and human rights of foreign immigrants in local communities, hence develops a concept of local citizenship. This concept seems to be highly significant for both foreign immigrants and Japanese dwellers for multicultural coexistence, but raises serious problems of separating local citizenship from formal national citizenship and from universal global citizenship. In order to resolve these problems, a new multiscalar concept of glocal citizenship which links interrelationally local, national and global citizenship. The concept of glocal citizenship is suggested to lead academically a new version of cosmopolitanism which embraces the universal and the particular in a dialectic manner, and to give strategically an alternative to multicultural coexistence policy and discourse and local citizenship discussion in Japan.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.13-36
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• 2012

This paper is to reconsider comprehensively and systematically major issues on transnational immigrants, increased rapidly since the beginning of the 1990s, and their impacts on socio-spatial changes in S. Korea. Foreign immigrants who have moved on the contexts of unevenness of globalization and advancces in transport & telecommunication technology on the global level and of economic development and shortage of cheap and unskilled workers have been distributed unevenly, concentrating on the Capital region and local areas with industrial complexes. Foreign workers seems to have some negative influences on regional economies in the long-term, though positive in the short-term. Domestic people seem to have an ambivalent attitude which accepts necessity of multi-culture, while simultaneously continues to be self-confident on ethnic homogeneity. The Korean government has launched multicultural policies for foreign immigrants by the mid-2000, but still continues some policies with assimilationism and differential exclusionism, marginalizing them socio-spatially, while lacking local government's policy and programmes. In conclusion, in order to resolve these problems and to transfer multicultural societal space of Korea, a geography of transnational migration which promotes especially discourse and policy with authentic multiculturalism, extending roles of local government, and ensuring glocal citizenships.