Embodying Uncertain Futures: Transnational Migrants in Korean National Time

Noël Um-Lo

In contexts of protracted conflict, how do time and national imaginaries shape access, belonging, and opportunity for migrant youth? What role do schools play in positioning transnational youth within national projects? Embodying Uncertain Futures: Transnational Migrants in Korean National Time explores these questions through an ethnography of North Korean-background communities in South Korea. Drawing on ethnographic research in faith-based alternative schools for North Korean youth, the book argues that anticipated unification serves as a governing horizon through which migrant populations are recognized, managed, and incorporated. Schools emerge as key sites where competing visions of North Korean migrants' place in Korea's future— those advanced by the state and those imagined by migrants themselves — are brought into tension. By foregrounding anticipation and temporality as political technologies of migrant governance, Embodying Uncertain Futures demonstrates how visions of a national future make citizenship conditional while revealing how migrant youth negotiate these demands to forge lives within and beyond the nation.

About Noël Um-Lo

Dr. Noël Um-Lo is a sociocultural anthropologist and a Postdoctoral Scholar at GW's Institute for Korean Studies. She is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Her research draws on political anthropology, international and comparative education, and critical diaspora studies to examine North Korean-background communities in South Korea and the U.S. She has written about schooling and neoliberalism in South Korea, and gendered migration between North Korea and China in policy-facing and fictional form.