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Project summary
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The proposed research aims to examine the different ways in which women and men have changed and negotiated their social relations, especially gender relations, in relation to economic, social and spatial transformations, and have participated in social construction and place-making since the 1960s through the case of the Cheonggyecheon riverside area in the centre of Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The area has been a site of many spatial transformations and has borne different social and cultural meanings for local people throughout its long history since Chosen Time. The Cheonggyecheon Stream has been recently restored in a new form as a part of a re-development plan of Seoul, and many changes in economic, social and cultural relations can be foreseen. This study focuses on the subjectivities and identities of people working in the area through ethnography. It especially attempts to reconstruct the diverse experiences of South Korean women in the urban informal sector as a historical process in order to envisage diverse alternative ways for the sustainable social development and the empowerment of women and men. This study will help us better understand the important contribution of people in the informal sector, in particular of women, in the process of economic and social transformation of the South Korean society. Simultaneously, it explores the meanings of the place, for those who inhabit it, from the viewpoint of economic and social relations such as gender, development of local culture, everyday struggles for betterment of life and formation of individual and collective identities.
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