• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.383-401
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• 2018

Wordsworth is a poet who thought seriously about problems of human's relation to the world as perceiving subjects. What he calls "the life of things" illustrates the enabling power of things and their vitalities at play in excess of human elements. Drawing on this, he provides insights into vital materialities that act upon, and are acted upon by, the collaborative circulation between human and nonhuman agency. This paper aims to reinvigorate the debate about Wordsworth's ethics of things in terms of such critical notions as things, objects, agency, and nonhumans in an attempt to explain what he envisions as new environmental realities built upon nonhierarchical, collaborative relationships between all participants. From the vantage point of things, we see clearly what has been neglected in the New Historicist critical method. It holds fast to the conceit that humans are entitled to have sole agential legitimacy, disregarding the vibrancy of things. They opt for the objectified matter or the (re)presented state of things. But in terms of Wordsworth's life of things, all participants have equal amounts of agency regardless of their forms and for that reason humans are expected to respect other things' sovereignty. Through encounters with things, things in their thingness show up for us, only to reveal the ineradicable rupture between themselves and their objectified forms.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.613-632
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• 2016

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene challenges public understanding of nature as a pure and singular entity removed from society, as the diagnosis confirms the earth-changing force of humans. In geography, the nature-society divide has been critically interrogated long before the diagnosis of the Anthropocene, developing several ways of theorizing nature-society relations. This paper introduces a new frontier for such theoretical endeavors: more-than-human geography. Inspired by the material and performative turn in geography and the social sciences around the 2000s, more-than-human geographers have sought to re-engage with the livingness of the world in the study of nature-society relations. Drawing on actor-network theory, non-representational theory (NRT) and vitalism, they have developed innovative ways of thinking about and relating to nature through the key concepts of 'nonhuman agency' and 'affect'. While more-than-human geography has been extensively debated and developed in recent Euro-American scholarship on cultural and economic geography, it has so far received limited attention in Korean geographical studies on nature. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing the key concepts and seminal work of more-than-human geography. I first outline four theoretical strands through which nature-society relations are perceived in geography. I then offer an overview of more-than-human geography, discussing its theoretical foundations and considering ontologies, epistemologies, politics and ethics associated with nature-society relations. Then, I compare more-than-human geography with political ecology, which is the mainstream critical approach in contemporary environmental social sciences. I would argue that more-than-human geography further challenges and develops political ecology through its heightened attention to the affective capacity of nonhumans and the methodological ethos of doing a careful political ecology. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of more-than-human geography for Korean studies on nature-society relations.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.665-681
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• 2022

This article compared and analyzed the SF films Snowpiercer and Space Sweepers, which embody the imagination of disaster for the future dystopian society. In common, the two films represent the future society as a society with a serious climate crisis and an extremely widening gap between the rich and the poor. Both films use similar narrative strategies: representing a isolated, twisted-willed scientist figure, building a main stage as catastrophic hierarchical capitalist society, and focusing on the conflicts between a dominant group possessing the science-capital-power and a resistant but ordinary subjects. However, there is the different framing on the future society in terms of representing nature, science technology, and human-nonhuman agency. This distinction is shaped by the narrative function of the objects represented by two films.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.1-40
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• 2019

Built upon ethnographic method such as participant observation and in-depth interview, this study analyzes the material culture of electronic flower auctions at Yangjae Flower Market. From the viewpoint of Actor-Network Theory(ANT), this research examines how human actors like dealers and auctioneers interact with nonhuman actors such as market devices and these interactions form networks called "agencement." This research is focused on three main objectives: first, to study how the performance of auctions - i.e. the interactions between auctioneers and dealers - change in the wake of new market devices in the auctions; secondly, to look into what changes artifacts bring to the social relationships between auctioneers and dealers; lastly, to analyze the influence of new market devices on auction price in the market. The results of this research are as follows. First, the appearance of new market devices generates changes in the performance of auctions, which means the change of 'agencement' of flower auctions. Direct interactions between auctioneers and dealers turned into indirect interactions through new market devices. Moreover, the changes in the agencement brought changes to the identity of auctioneers and dealers. Secondly, the new agencement caused by the inflow of new market devices formed the trust between the devices and human actors, which gave rise to the trust in electronic auction and in counterpart actors as well. In addition, new market devices lowered direct interactions between auctioneers and dealers and thus made more equal relationships between the two than before. Lastly, market devices like trading screen reduced the leverage of auctioneers by providing dealers with bidding information previously possessed by auctioneers much openly and dealers were able to decide auction prices in more reasonable and dispassionate manner. Economic agency, power, trust, price, and information in the market is material and sensory.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.1 no.1 s.1
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• pp.201-234
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• 2001

Sociology(or social science in general) is often diagnosed as in the state of 'crisis' after the collapse of socialism and the erosion of national societies because of rapid globalization. This paper introduces some recent work within science and technology studies(STS) and discusses its potentials to reinvigorate sociology. Although sociologists have rarely regarded STS as contributing to 'mainstream' issues in sociology, an increasing number of STS writers and sociologists have recently started to notice such possibilities. One main reason of this recent change is that STS is no longer merely concerned to convey substantive findings about science and technology, but instead attempts to reconstruct key notions of sociology such as 'social', 'society' and 'agency'. It is in this respect that the discussion below aims to introduce, discuss, and assess the potential contribution of some recent work of STS to sociology. In particular, it is 'actor-network theory'(ANT) that explicitly attempts to examine and suggest the ways in which STS ran help innovate sociology. One major characteristics of ANT is to impute 'agency' to things(nonhumans) unlike traditional sociology. ANT argues that if sociology studies heterogeneous relationships between humans and nonhumans instead of human relations only, it can become once again a vigorous discipline which is able to provide alternative worlds central to the basis of sociology. So this paper focuses on, not the diverse approaches of STS, the characteristics of ANT and its potential contribution to sociology. The author concludes that ANT can not only rejuvenate sociology by implicating new forms of alternative worlds but also open the possibility to contribute to the democratic reformulation of human-nonhuman relationships.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.99-147
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• 2016

This paper critically reviews the previous discussion over public engagement with science and technology by Science and Technology Studies literatures with a focus on justification and acceptance. Recent studies pointed out that the "participatory turn" after the late 1990s was followed by confusion and disagreement over the meaning and agency of public engagement. Their discussion over the reproduction of the ever-present boundary between science and society along with so-called late modernity and post-normal science and sometimes through the very processes of public engagement draws fresh attention to the old problem: how can lay participation in decision-making be justified, even if we agree that privileging the position of experts in governance of science and technology is no longer justified? So far STS have focused on two conditions for participatory turn-1) uncertainties inherent in experts' ways of knowing and 2) practicability of lay knowledge. This paper first explicated why such discussion has not been logically sufficient nor successful in promoting a wide and well-thought-out acceptance of public engagement. Then the paper made a preliminary attempt to explain what new types of expertise can support the construction and sustainment of participatory governance in science and technology by focusing on one case of lay participation. The particular case discussed by the paper revolves around the actions of a civil organization and an activist who led legal and regulatory changes in wind power development in Jeju Special Self-governing Province. The paper analyzed the types of expertise constructed to be effective and legitimate during the constitution of participatory energy governance and the local society's support for it. The arguments of this paper can be summarized as follows. First, an appropriate basis of the normative claim that science and technology governance should make participatory turn cannot be drawn from the essential characteristics of lay publics-as little as of experts. Second, the type of 'expertise' which can justify participatory governance can only be constructed a posteriori as a result of the practices to re-construct the boundaries between factual statements and value judgment. Third, an intermediary expertise, which this paper defines as a type of expertise in forming human-nonhuman associations and their new pathways for circulations, made significant contribution in laying out the legal and regulatory foundation for revenue sharing in Jeju wind power development. Fourth, experts' conventional ways of knowing need to be supplemented, not supplanted, by lay expertise. Ultimately, the paper calls for the necessity to extend STS discussion over governance toward following the actors. What needs more thorough analysis is such actors' narratives and practices to re-construct the boundaries between the past and present, facts and values, science and society. STS needs a renewed focus on the actual sites of conflicts and decision-making in discussing participatory governance.