In a recently published study [Perspective Chapter: The Illusion of Dystopian Justice as a Means toward Social Justice. K-drama’s Global Success Unveiled http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1006893], I conducted a preliminary analysis of several South Korean TV series to explore how they engage with themes central to the ongoing discourse on the Global South. These series delve into the distortions of neoliberal society, articulating social discontent surrounding economic and power imbalances. Specifically, I argue that contemporary South Korean audiovisual productions do not offer escapist or optimistic visions of the future. Instead, any semblance of hope for social empowerment and improvement is placed in frameworks of dystopian or unrealistic justice, situating such hope outside the realm of reality or the legal structures and values shared by democratic governments globally.

While it may be premature to claim that South Korea's film and television industry is taking the lead in developing a global counter-narrative, it is undeniable that its audiovisual content—deeply rooted in local contexts and culture—resonates on a global scale, attracts millions of viewers worldwide, and sets new standards both technically and in terms of content. South Korean audiovisual production's global resonance largely stems from the way these narratives confront urgent issues of global power imbalances, offering a unique lens through which such inequalities are examined.

Building upon these initial findings, my current paper seeks to take further steps in this line of inquiry. First, I aim to expand my corpus by exploring additional narratives within South Korean audiovisual productions. Additionally, I plan to address a broader range of topics. Specifically, my focus will shift toward narratives that delve into the root causes of global imbalances. At this stage of my research, I am particularly interested in stories depicting how citizens of the Global South are compelled to shoulder social responsibilities in sustaining democratic systems, especially during periods when long-lasting or endemic social disparities escalate into severe inequities or injustices.

These narratives confront the subjugation of the Global South by politically, culturally, and economically dominant powers, including hegemonic states, ideologies, and global economic-financial systems. Within this context, they portray a sense of civic responsibility toward one’s national community, as expressed or perceived by the social actors featured in these series, such as politicians, media representatives, and law enforcement officials, but also ordinary citizens. These narratives examine the capacity of citizens to devise meaningful alternatives or any form of counter-power grounded in local values and needs. By doing so, these narratives challenge audiences to consider the potential for grassroots movements and localized approaches to offer viable solutions to systemic global injustices.

The simultaneous emergence of feminist movement in South Korea and Mexico, or the resonance between the “Red Light, Green Light” game in the popular show Squid Game and the lived experiences of migrants crossing the border, exemplify the transnational fluidity of meaning. Drawing upon Derrida’s notion of “différance”, which posits the inherent instability and interconnectedness of signification, this panel seeks to interrogate the “hauntings” of meaning within a global/transnational South Korean context.

Specifically, we seek to address the traces shared in cultural productions from South Korea and other parts of the world. Our focus is on non-traditional encounters that transcend the pursuit of social mobility (i.e., the “American Dream”), teleological progress, or other capitalist, modern, or humanistic aspirations. Instead, we seek to explore encounters that are intransitive (Nan Da 2018), contactless or virtual, self-destructive, deconstructionist, and, ideally, between minorities or marginalized communities. We invite contributions that explore how meaning is generated, disseminated, and destabilized through processes of cultural exchange, political mobilization, and artistic representation, recognizing that signification is perpetually in flux, resisting fixed demarcations and ontological boundaries.

Given these premises, we thus welcome papers on (but not limited to) the following topics and/or related topics:

*Representations of 'minor' transnationalism in media, examining how cultural productions depict the experiences and perspectives of marginalized communities within and beyond South Korea.

*Critical analyses of South Korean cultural productions, employing deconstructive approaches to uncover hidden power structures, challenge dominant narratives, and shed light on social issues with global resonance.

* Explorations of the relationship between South Korea and the Global South as represented in media, including depictions of solidarity, conflict, and cultural exchange.

* Examinations of how various media forms explore the global or transnational impact of wars (like the Cold War), political movements (like the Gwangju Uprising), and national trauma on South Korea's modern history and its ongoing legacies.

We encourage submissions from people working understudied connections between Korea and the rest of the world. For example, cultural exchanges or encounters between Korea and countries in Europe, Africa, South-East Asia, and Latin America.

To submit your work, kindly email both Janeth Manriquez Ruiz at mmanriq2@nd.edu and Inha Park at ipark2@nd.edu.

In her book, The Disposition of Nature, from 2019 Jennifer Wenzel poses a question that is fundamental for thinking with the planet. She asks what the world-imagining that corporations foster look like, and how those ‘imaginaries’ have a shaping effect on the warming planet we inhabit. This question remains unanswered. In this paper, I attend to guilt, a major environmental affect, that plays a crucial role in precisely the world view that individuals and communities inherit from corporations. While guilt has largely been written of in both climate communication and environmental art, as an apathy-inducing, regressive environmental affect, I will demonstrate the potentials of guilt. I argue guilt has a shaping effect on environmental narratives, blooming into unexpected aesthetic modes that can negotiate the glaring discrepancy between the emotional experience and the scientific knowledge of the climate crisis. Locating and analyzing art that accounts for such discrepancies of living through the climate crisis is crucial for environmental scholarship, especially since such art, turns out to flourish outside the Anglophone world, thereby also broadening the rather slim and homegenous cli-fi canon. Therefore, I will demonstrate how guilt functions in two ‘cli-fi workplace’ novels, one from South Korea, Yun ko-Eun’s The Disaster Tourist and the other from Argentina, Agustina Baztericca’s Tender is the flesh. I find that guilt is not a stable, moral emotion, but rather a a ‘sticky affect’, that is continuously assigned and rejected by characters, corporations and readers, as an unresolved planetary emotion for humans living under the condition of environmental crisis. Guilt is particularly fruitful for negotiating the tug-of-war between world imaginings that living in a crisis causes, because of its position in-between the personal and the political, the private and the public. I will deploy a planetary comparativist method that favor tracing relations between smaller parts of the literary works rather national elements, thus eliciting illuminating surprising thematic and narrative connections across oceans. Reading for ambivalently negative affects through a planetary comparativist method, illuminates the complex inter-relations of climate crisis with capitalism, class and gender across the planet.