Finland-Korea Symposium

Date/time: 12 Oct 2023, 13:00-17:00hrs

Venue: Tieteiden Talo, Hall 104, Helsinki

Please note that for organisational reasons registration for the event is required. Registration is open until 5 October 2023, 18:00hrs.

If you have any questions, please email us: ceas@utu.fi

 

*** Programme***

13:00 – 13:20

Welcoming remarks

Sabine Burghart, Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS), University of Turku

Erja Kettunen-Matilainen, Finland – Republic of Korea Association

 

Congratulatory remarks

H.E. Jung-ha Kim, Ambassador, Embassy of the Republic of Korea to Finland

Mr. Jari Sinkari, Director General, Department for the Americas and Asia, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland

 

13:20 – 14:20

Retrospect and Prospect of Bilateral Relations

Chair: Youngtae Shin (Visiting Professor, CEAS, University of Turku)

Elina Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute for International Affairs) On security policy

Erja Kettunen-Matilainen (Turku School of Economics, University of Turku) Finland-Korea economic relations in the framework of EU-Korea FTA

Katri Kauhanen (CEAS, University of Turku) Helvi Sipilä in Korea - A piece of women's history connecting Finland and South Korea

Q & A

 

14:20 – 14:50 coffee break [and group photo]

 

14:50 – 15:50

Societies and Politics from a Comparative Perspective

Chair: Sabine Burghart (CEAS, University of Turku)

Veli-Matti Karhulahti (University of Jyväskylä) How Claw Cranes Came to South Korea?

Jingoo Kang (University of Eastern Finland) Unveiling the Motivations Behind Science Teacher Aspirations: A Cross-Cultural Study of Career Entry Motivations among Science Preservice Teachers in Finland and Korea

Bokyong Shin (University of Helsinki) Assessing citizen participation in public decision-making: participatory budgeting projects in Seoul and Helsinki

Q & A

 

16:00 – 17:00

Roundtable: Common Interests and Issues of Concern

Moderator: Andrew Logie (University of Helsinki)

Discussants:

Marja Kuosmanen (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland)

Youngtae Shin (Visiting Professor, CEAS, University of Turku)

Veli-Matti Karhulahti (University of Jyväskylä)

Jingoo Kang (University of Eastern Finland)

Elina Ahonpää-Kim (CEO, BaeStyle Ltd / Yeppo&Soonsoo)

 

17:00 Final remarks

**end of symposium**

 

            

***

Ahonpää-Kim, Elisa studied at Helsinki University as a Linguistics major 2014-2018/2019ish after she founded her company and has been running Yeppo&Soonsoo as a CEO since then. Her company now has six stores around Finland with an international team of 45 employees. Yeppo&Soonsoo aims to be the best and biggest k-beauty retailer in Northern Europe before year 2025.

Burghart, Sabine, PhD, is university lecturer and Academic Director of the Master’s Degree Programme in East Asian Studies at the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS), University of Turku. Her current research interests concern South Korea’s foreign aid initiatives such as the Global Saemaul Undong Programme and the humanitarian arena in North Korea. Recent research collaboration included Goethe University Frankfurt/Korean Studies (2018-2021) and California State University, Sacramento (2019-2022). She also promotes and engages in international teaching collaboration in Korean Studies and is co-founder of the multidisciplinary intensive course Nordic/Nordic-Baltic Korean Studies Days (2019, 2021, 2022). She spent more than five years of her professional career in Korea, and facilitated various capacity building projects and three EU-DPRK workshops in North Korea. Together with Erja, she is the main organiser of this symposium.

Kang Jingoo is an assistant professor at the University of Eastern Finland, specializing in Science Education. With a Ph.D. in the field, his research primarily centers on promoting gender equity in STEM education and careers, STEM teacher motivation, and the advancement of sustainable educational practices. Dr. Kang is particularly passionate about ensuring equitable access to high-quality STEM education for all students. His expertise also extends to large-scale data analysis, including international assessment studies like PISA and TIMSS, which he leverages to inform science education policy and practice. Lastly, as a Korean professional working in Finland, Dr. Kang has conducted insightful comparative studies between the Finnish and Korean education systems.

Karhulahti, Veli-Matti (PhD) is a senior researcher at University of Jyväskylä. Most of his time goes to running an ERC StG project "Ontological Reconstruction of Gaming Disorder" (2022–2027), which is cross-cultural enterprise from Finland and Korea to beyond. Matti's work is interdisciplinary across anthropology, design, game studies, health sciences, and psychology. He is interested in how play and technology interact with human development, and methodologically, how such questions can be studied to begin with. He has previously worked in Denmark (IT University of Copenhagen, Royal Danish Academy), Korea (Yonsei University), and the US (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Kauhanen, Katri is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS), University of Turku. In her dissertation she explores the history of women's movement in South Korea and its transnational connections with global feminisms during the Cold War. Historian by training, she is interested in the interplay between authoritarian and democratic forces and transnational networks in the making of modern South Korea. Her work has been published for example in the journal positions, and for the past five years she wrote on Korean affairs for The Ulkopolitist, a Finnish-language online media on international politics. 

Kettunen-Matilainen, Erja, Dr.Sc.(Econ.), is Docent and Senior Research Fellow of Economic Geography at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku. Her research and teaching focuses on EU-Asia economic and trade relations, trade policies, and company-government relations of European firms in East and Southeast Asia. She has published on sustainable development issues in Free Trade Agreements (FTA), trade barriers, Asian economic regionalism, and Europe-Asia transports. Recently, she was Visiting Scholar at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, as well as at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen. Erja currently leads the project “Good and bad palm oil” (2023-2027) on the international policies, negotiations and ethics of palm oil production and use, funded by KONE Foundation. She is active in societal relations and is the President of the Finland–Republic of Korea Association in Helsinki.

Kuosmanen, Marja works for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs as Team Leader for East Asia at the Unit for East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. Her work covers East Asian countries, including the Republic of Korea. Before the current position, she was Deputy Head of the Trade Policy Unit at the Department for International Trade. During her career, she has dealt with both trade policy and security policy issues in bilateral and multilateral context. In addition to Helsinki, she has served abroad as Minister Counsellor at the Finnish Embassy in Washington DC (2009-2013), as Counsellor at the Permanent OSCE Delegation of Finland in Vienna (2007-2009), as First Secretary at the Permanent Delegation of Finland in Geneva (1998-2002) and as Second Secretary at the Embassy of Finland in Tokyo (1995-1998). 

Logie, Andrew researches and teaches on Korea at the University of Helsinki. He completed his BA and MA at SOAS, and his PhD at Helsinki. His research interests encompass five areas: archaeology and history of early Korea and Asia from late prehistory to early states; popular discourses of early Korea and Asia with a focus on Korean pseudohistory; comparative approaches to early Korea and Mainland Southeast Asia; Korean new religious movements; and Korean popular music history. He teaches widely on Korea across the following topics: daily life; literature, screen (film) and performance arts; and contemporary politics and society.

Shin Bokyong is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki, Finland. He studies democratic (e.g., participatory budgeting, collaborative governance, and digital participation) and social innovations (e.g., university—industry collaboration) to assess how citizens engage and influence diverse participatory processes. Bokyong is especially interested in combining theory-driven (e.g., governance, communicative planning, social capital, collective intelligence, and innovation models) and data-driven approaches (e.g., big data analytics and machine learning) to explore new research methods in the digital era. Bokyong is also involved in the "Co-creation Radar" project funded by Business Finland to create a new research-based and scalable business opportunity.

Shin Youngtae received her PhD in political science at the University of Washington, Seattle WA in 1992. Since then, she taught at the University of Central Oklahoma as professor in Political Science and simultaneously directed Asian Studies minor until her retirement in July 2023. She published three books (one in Korean) and many articles in areas of women and politics (politics broadly defined). Her current scholarly interest is to study the relationship between women’s political success and their role in promoting nationalism. She makes a distinction between internally oriented nationalism and externally directed expansionist one and postulates that there is a close relationship between the nature of nationalism and the degree of women’s success in domestic politics. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of Turku studying Finnish women’s political involvement in national politics.  She hopes to explore the relationship between nationalism and women’s political success holds true in the Finnish women’s success in politics.  For this purpose, she intends to immerse herself in Finnish culture and its recent history.  In her spare time, she likes to learn international folk dances (very interested in learning Finnish folk dance) and sings in her church choir. She is also writing her memoir for her grandchildren so that they will have some knowledge about their Korean roots from their maternal side even though they do not have Korean last names.   

Sinkkonen, Elina is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) and holds the Title of Docent in East Asian Studies at the University of Turku. Her research interests include great power relations, authoritarian regimes, regional security in East Asia, Chinese nationalism, public opinion issues in China and domestic-foreign policy nexus in IR theory. Sinkkonen’s work has been published in Political Psychology, Democratization, The China Quarterly, The Pacific Review, European Review of International Studies and European Foreign Affairs Review, among others. She received her doctorate from University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations. More information about her research can be found from www.elinasinkkonen.com.