How have young South Korean's attitudes towards government and politics changed in recent years?
Supervised by Dr Jieun Kim, Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Cultures, University of Leeds
As an International History and Politics student, one area that holds great interest to me is that of East Asian politics (particularly South Korean and Japanese), When looking through the pre-defined projects available I found a lack of projects that would allow me to explore this avenue of interest. Therefore, I created mine with the aim of focusing on tragedies in South Korea that have disproportionately affected the youth. These events are the Sewol Ferry Disaster of 2014 and Itaewon Crowd Crush of 2022.
I have picked these two events due to a quote that was found at an Itaewon Memorial Site. 'When I lost a friend in the Sewol ferry 8 years ago, I thought it was my last tear, but I lost friends again.'. This quote perfectly exemplifies the repetition of tragedies on the lives of the young. The Sewol saw 250 students in the Ferry. Had these students survived, they would have been the age of those who died in Itaewon. The stark similarities of these two tragedies has led me to focus on these to conduct my research.
My research question will research the effect of aforementioned tragedies on the youth of South Korea. Due to both of these events being caused by government negligence it will be extremely useful to investigate the effect this has had on the opinions held by the youth. I will be largely using pre-existing research to reach my own conclusions.
Throughout my research my main aim to help contribute to not allowing these tragedies to simply become a part of history with no lessons learned from them. I hope to display the effects government corruption has on everyone in society, especially the youth and hold respective governments accountable throughout my research.