Resettlement Schools and the Sacred and Secular Politics of Korean Unification

Noël Um-Lo

Born in China to North Korean mothers trafficked across the border, displaced youth arrive in South Korea only to find themselves suspended in a legal gray zone. They are granted citizenship as children of North Korean escapees, but excluded from housing, welfare, and education subsidies reserved for those born in the North. Scholarship on migrant and refugee youth has shown that states govern through logics of assimilation, multiculturalism, and securitized control—frameworks that demand performative belonging while withholding full access to rights, resources, and protection. Yet few have examined how migration governance can be embedded in a state project like unification, enacted through civil society institutions and structured by competing demands of recognition and exclusion. This dissertation examines how Korean unification, though receding as a geopolitical reality, persists as an infrastructural logic deeply embedded in the everyday lives of the North Korean diaspora. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic research with North Korean- and Chinese-born youth in South Korea and the U.S., this project maps the social life of unification through the circulation of money and labor across a transnational network that includes INGOs, churches, U.S. federal programs, and educational institutions. By following these youth within and beyond resettlement schools, this dissertation examines the pathways through which they become selectively visible to the South Korean state. In doing so, it asks: how do North Korean displaced youth and the civil society actors that govern them strategically mobilize the logic of unification for their own advancement?

About Noël Um-Lo

Noël Um-Lo is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines politics, education, and religion within the North Korean diaspora across China, South Korea, and the United States. She is interested in how states and civil society institutions map religious and political meaning onto the experience of displacement. At its core, her current project asks what it means to be folded into a nation’s future while being excluded from its present. In addition to the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, this research has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in Cultural Anthropology and the Teachers College Dean’s Grant for Student Research. Noël's writing has been published in City & Society, and is forthcoming in Migration Policy Institute’s Migration Information Source. She holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University and a B.A. in Social and Political History from Carnegie Mellon University. Beyond her academic pursuits, she is a poet, dancer, and mother, who deeply enjoys spending quality time with the young people in her life between New York City and Seoul.