Voluntelling the Voluntoured: State-Prompted South Korean English Language and Labor Mobility in Australia

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, the South Korean state has promoted English language education as a key resource in globalizing its workforce and establishing itself as a world-class knowledge economy. Using multi-country longitudinal ethnographic research and in-depth interviews across South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines, this paper situates the everyday experiences of South Korean working holidaymakers in Australia within larger state narratives of South Korean national ascendance. While South Korea’s repositioning as a global power has opened doors to liberalize travel and forms of global citizenship, the experiences of working holidaymakers on the ground express the limits of South Korea’s alleged national power. While young South Koreans travel to Australia in hopes of learning English and gaining cultural exposure, instead they find themselves conscripted into a migrant labor system that precariously positions them as unfamiliar racialized outsiders. At the same time, migrants’ narrations of their own processes and experiences of meaning-making and solidarity-building reveal how they continue to push against instrumental claims and narrow perceptions of language education. Ultimately, this research suggests that South Korean migrant workers bargain for paradoxical inclusion as they negotiate their racialized positioning in Australian society while carving out bounded, albeit cosmopolitan, experiences of world-making.