Michael Hurt

Michael Hurt – Featured Speaker @ KOTESOL 2024

 Featured Session

How Korea Got Cool: Ethnography and the Korean Style

This talk will look through the lens of Korean street fashion and connect it up to K-pop, K-cinema, and hallyu, taking a visual approach. The talk will also be grounded in the fact that I’ve consulted for Pinterest, Google, Facebook, and Instagram, who’ve all come to the conclusion that what Koreans are doing now is what the rest of the world will be doing a few years from now. And the best way to know things, to track actual, real influence in the world, is the ethnographic method as found in anthropology and sociology.

The talk will hopefully be able to give the audience some additional “handles” on Korea, especially since so many people here like to play armchair anthropologist on Korea, which I’d say is the number one unacknowledged pastime here. And as for ESL applications, we will explore how the the question of how we know things we think we know – epistemology – can be the generator of lots of related sub-questions about what real-world influence Korean culture actually has around the world, as opposed to the flat, toothless discussions of “soft power” that tend to be had in uninspired conversation classes. Where does the soft-power rubber hit the road? And how exactly does soft power benefit the nation, especially as we think about what the nature of social/cultural “influence” even is? What are the particular levers of Korean cultural influence, and what do they look like? These are the harder – and therefore more interesting – $250 per hour, topline report questions that, if one can answer, really pay the bills.

 Biosketch

Michael W. Hurt, PhD, is a photographer and professor living, shooting, and researching in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies. He also started Korea’s first street fashion blog in 2006 and published the first English language book about Korean fashion in 2009. He researches youth, street fashion, and digital subcultures in Seoul while lecturing on cultural theory and art history at the Korea National University of the Arts. He was the first researcher to focus on Korea’s street fashion hyperculture and has been shooting and publishing through it since 2007. His present research focuses on using the camera to access and document emergent digital subcultures in Korea, including the political economy of the “pay model” on Korean Instagram, Seoul’s drag underground, and the youth-centric LGBTQ movement in Korea. His work is visual sociology in that he applies ethnographic analyses, centering the camera and visuality, to the youth cultures and communities that also tend to form precisely around such visual images and digitally enabled social spaces. He also does cultural consulting on Korea for companies from Google to Pinterest, from P&G to Meta, and continues such research that coheres around his ethnographic photography.

Select Sites 
Michael Hurt: Curriculum Vitae.
Michael Hurt: Academia.com.
Michael Hurt: LinkedIn.
Michael Hurt: Instagram.
Michael Hurt: Medium.
K-Poppin': Insider with Michael Hurt [Video].
Michael Hurt Article for The English Connection.

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