Complementary sources

Besides the interview data, the evidence upon which this thesis is based on also comes from the review of documents (including white papers, documents published by GO/NGOs, presidential speeches, and media reports and editorials) and the analysis of comments from certain anti-multiculturalist online communities. Although the interview data was given prominence in organising the analysis of contemporary multicultural discourses, other sources also contributed to providing evidence of the ideological constellations of racism and nationalism of the past and present. Furthermore, the use of these sources was not confined to the final presentation of my analysis. Primarily, these sources were used to develop my knowledge of the field, refine my research questions before/during the fieldwork, and inform the ways in which interviews were designed and conducted. Reversely, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, interviewees’ accounts on certain events or people also led me to examine a specific time, objects, and relevant discourses by resorting to these complementary sources. In this sense, the employment of these sources for the project cannot be decoupled from the process of planning, conducting and analysing the interviews.

The process of examining comments from certain online communities requires a more detailed explanation particularly considering its extensive employment in Chapter five. Initially, as explained earlier, anti-multicultural online communities were selected to identify potential interviewees, get preliminary ideas of their self- referential languages and rhetorical codes as part of my preparation for interviews, and also use them as complementary sources for interviews with anti- multiculturalists. In this sense, the Internet was both a recruitment tool and fieldwork

97 site for this research project. These online communities, indeed, were rich sources for gathering data since they are a major platform for communication for anti- multiculturalists and a recruitment tool for anti-immigration activism. Not only issues of immigration, ‘foreigners’, and multiculturalism were discussed – covering criticisms on the government’s multicultural policies and pro-migrant NGO activities, assessment of media reports on migrant-related issues, sharing of personal stories, hyperlinks and comments on international news (e.g. European backlash against multiculturalism, Norway shooting in 2011), but also virtually all of their off-line activities were planned, announced, and evaluated through these online communities. In this sense, such online communities are telling examples of how the Internet enables people to ‘sense, listen, feel and be involved intimately in racist culture from a distance’ (Back 2002, 629). Despite the early optimism about the Internet’s potential to create a ‘race-free’ environment where greater democratic participation is possible, it is becoming clear that racial inequality persists no matter how wired we are. Moreover, the Net itself is far from being race-netural in that it continues to generate varying degress of racialized communications and racial identity practices and facilitates new modes of racist imagination (cf. Kolko et al. 2000). Nakamura and Chow-White writes:

Mediatized conversations about race, whether on the Internet with human interlocutors or with the torrent of digitized media texts, have become an increasingly important channel for discourse about our difference. (Nakamura and Chow-White 2012, 5)

From this perspective, anti-multicultural online communities were chosen as an important research site to examine how differences are narrated and race is

98 performed. It is worth noting that in the thesis, these online communities are not deemed as a separate, distinctive space detached from the offline context and broader societal discourse. In other words, the online/offline distinction is not pursued as a research strategy. Though the relationship between the digital and race requires a more complex approach to understand the implications of technology in generating new modalities of race – different from those produced by analog media – such a line of investigation has not been thoroughly attempted here since it goes beyond the scope of the thesis. The underlying position of this thesis in terms of online/offline data collection is to find the best way to answer my research questions, which according to Hine (2005, 20), can be achieved at times ‘through research relationships conducted solely online’, but in other cases, ‘be best served by moving research relationships either from online to offline or vice versa’. Concerning my research, the research relationship with members of anti-multicultural online communities has moved from online to offline and back. There have been discussions about the benefits and problems associated with the triangulation of methods when combining online and offline data in digital research (cf. Hine 2000; Hine 2005; Garcia et al. 2009). On the one hand, combining online contact with offline is generally regarded beneficial since it enables a researcher to understand the Internet-based phenomenon in link with the broader social context which it is embedded in. On the other, a generic emphasis on the benefits of offline interactions with informants may run the risk of assuming that the offline method would allow more authentic and reliable data to be collated, which could turn out not to be true (Orgad 2005, 52-3). In my case, though the offline interview data have not been regarded as a more credible source, offline interactions were given primacy. This is because I needed to harmonise the examination of anti-multicultural online

99 communities with the core method of the thesis – in-depth interviews with various actors in the politics of multiculturalism.

Whilst several anti-multicultural online communities were initially targeted as sources of data collection, the decision to include one of the major mums’ online communities was made after completing my fieldwork. As briefly mentioned earlier, during fieldwork, I identified the distinctive dynamics of the racialisation of Korean Chinese (Chosŏnjok) migrants, which seemed useful in understanding the relationship between ‘race’, nation and culture in constructing racism. However, because many NGO activists were evasive when talking about Korean Chinese migrants (for example, saying they felt uncomfortable to discuss this matter because they knew very little about it), which itself surely is a significant research finding to reflect upon, I decided to include some pastors who had been working for Korean Chinese migrants’ rights and also some Korean Chinese migrants as my interviewees. To understand one of the reasons why many NGO activists were unforthcoming about the discussions of Korean Chinese migrants, and the reason why I contacted pastors, a brief background explanation of Korean Chinese migrants’ rights movement is needed (which will be further elaborated in Chapter five).

Despite their ‘ethnic Koreanness’ upon which the concept tongp’o (blood kinship of overseas Koreans) is based, the Korean state has not granted the majority of Korean Chinese migrants (who are proportionally the largest migrant group) preferential treatment for overseas ethnic Koreans to work and stay in Korea. Although they have been rhetorically included as tongp’o (and legally since 2004), the flow of Korean Chinese workers (mostly manual workers) is still regulated by the current

100 immigration system by granting them a specific visa status (which is different from most overseas ethnic Koreans and also from other foreign migrant workers). Korean Chinese churches have been playing a major role in the fight for the legal recognition of Korean Chinese migrants as tongp’o and for the relaxation of their immigration status (Piao 2011). However, mainly because the immigration status of Korean Chinese migrants in Korea has become different from that of other foreign workers, and the rationales for the Korean Chinese rights movement have been firmly grounded on their blood-kinship with Koreans, the solidarity between the migrant rights movement in general and the Korean Chinese struggle for recognition is (practically) non-existent. Against this background, most migrant rights activists who work with foreign migrants do not work on the issues of Korean Chinese migrants while such issues are largely put forward by Korean Chinese NGOs including Korean Chinese churches.

A month after I finished my fieldwork and got back to the UK, a mutilation murder was committed by a Chosŏnjok migrant and anti-Chosŏnjok feelings spread rapidly, while various stories about the case and Chosŏnjok crime stories in general were extensively circulated by the media. While reviewing media reports and comment/stories from online communities, I became interested in the increasing concerns about Chosŏnjok babysitters [aka Chosŏnjok aunties], which also were stimulated by the recent intensification of discourses criminalising the Chosŏnjok. And indeed, these topics – crimes committed by migrants and ‘problems of

Chosŏnjok babysitters’ – had popped up during interviews and informal conversations from my fieldwork. However, considering the fact that my interview data in relation to these issues was limited and also temporally anti-Chosŏnjok

101 discourses seemed to gather momentum after the outbreak of the murder case, I decided to include a mums’ online community where stories about Chosŏnjok babysitters were actively shared. Though there were practical considerations (e.g. time and money) in deciding not to pursue additional interviews but to use other sources, it was also a strategic decision that could better capture the creation and circulation of criminalising narratives.

Comments and discussions from these online communities can be considered to be more honest (and overt) because people speak on the condition of anonymity. Indeed, McKenna et al. (2002) find evidence that the relative anonymity of online communication settings creates a ‘strangers on a train’ phenomenon in which ‘people sometimes share quite intimate information with their anonymous seatmates’ (p. 10), by reducing the cost of self-disclosure (see also Bargh et al. (2002)). This could be more so the case with discussions of taboo subjects such as ‘race’. Yet as Sharpe (1999) puts it:

It is not simply that we can be more “honest” about race issues on the Internet because we are not accountable but that the personas we create (even if they begin as “us”) start to take on lives of their own in relation to those whom they encounter. The Internet allows for the consensual as well as the non-consensual acting out of racialized fantasies. (Sharpe 1999, 1094)

That these online comments can be read as the performance of ‘non-consensual racialised fantasies’ and also that these fantasies can feed into new consensual racial images encouraged me to explore these online communities particularly in relation to discourses of criminalisation and problematisation. Furthermore, since I was interested not only in the creation of stories about the Chosŏnjok but in the

102 reproduction of these stories, and not only in the contents of these narratives but also in the very narrativisation of these contents, these online communities functioned as perfect sites for gathering data. For instance, whilst in-depth interviewing may provide thicker description of the stories about the Chosŏnjok, it may be less capable of uncovering the ways in which these stories or images are circulated and variably narrated.

The rationale for collecting and analysing data with respect to Chosŏnjok babysitters (in Chapter five) came from this perspective. Concerning the organisation of data collection and analysis, I also needed to make the amount of collected data practically manageable for analysis. For this, I collected data from one of the major mums’ online communities from the 1st

of April to the 30th of September 2012 (six months after the aforementioned mutilation murder case). This online community is one of the largest online communities for mums with approximately 1.83 million (1,827,798) members (as of 6 December 2012). Members share information about pregnancy, childcare, etc. In this online community, there are diverse sub-groups where members chat about their life and exchange information according to place of residence (various regions in Korea and abroad), age, number of children and various other criteria. There is also a chat room specifically for multicultural mums. The main reason I chose this online community for my analysis is because members actively share their experience related to Chosŏnjok babysitters. Furthermore, I intended to choose an online community that officially has nothing to do with the anti-multicultural agenda or Chosŏnjok immigration issues, in order not to limit my scope of analysis to hard-core self-professed anti-multiculturalists. From this online community, the posts including the word, Chosŏnjok, were collected and analysed

103 qualitatively with a specific focus on stories about Chosŏnjok crimes and Chosŏnjok babysitters. The number of posts which matched such criteria was 264 in total (excluding replies to original posts). I did not keep a separate count of the number of replies but they are included in my analysis when the original post included the word, Chosŏnjok.

As can be seen in the aforementioned process of choosing additional sites of data collection and using these data, the employment of complementary sources were not entirely pre-planned or treated with rigorous and formal methods. Rather these sources were brought into the research process organically while designing, conducting and analysing my fieldwork.

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