2026 Theses Doctoral

Diasporic Bodies in Unification Time: Citizenship, Faith, and Schooling in Transnational Korea

Um-Lo, Noël

Imagined state futures are made materially actionable through policy research, legislative strategy, and scenario-based planning that treat uncertain futures as governable in the present. South Korea’s vision for a unified Korea follows this logic, even as shifting inter-Korean relations and heightened geopolitical uncertainty have rendered a contemporary vision of unification, at best, stalled, and at worst, indefinitely foreclosed. Despite unification remaining a seemingly distant and unknowable horizon, state and civil society actors continue to engage in professionalized forms of unification preparation as if this future were foreseeable, immediate, and near. Such preparation also structures the forms of citizenship available to transnational migrants, particularly to members of the North Korean diaspora.

Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in schools, churches, and NGOs, this dissertation examines how the distant future of Korean unification is made material and advanceable through the disciplining of North Korean-background subjects to state and religious temporalities. Following Jane Guyer’s (2007) understanding of prophetic time as a present attached to a distant future, I illustrate how state and civil society actors in South Korea address the gap between the present and a unified future Korea by cultivating a condition of perpetual readiness located primarily in the bodies of North Korean-background subjects.

I contend that Korean unification is made temporally advanceable through: (1) framing North Korean migrants’ assimilation as civic participation; (2) obscuring North Korean women’s transnational reproductive labor in China; (3) binding conditional citizenship of North Korean-background subjects to state time; and (4) interpreting their Korean Protestant faith practices as forms of national and spiritual preparatory labor. Despite their positioning within a nationalist project, North Korean diasporic youth are not simply formed to these temporal demands. They engage “unification time” through negotiation, performance, and refusal, demonstrating their capacity to organize their present within the nation while imagining alternative futures beyond it. By using time as a primary analytic, this dissertation shows how the South Korean state positions North Korean-background migrants as actors who help materialize an imagined national future, and how migrants, in turn, engage or disengage this imaginary to envision their own futures.