The K-Future Team hosted its second Theory Atelier colloquium on June 24, featuring Professor Heonik Kwon, a world-renowned scholar in Korean studies and social anthropology. Under the theme “Global Korean Studies: Prospects and a Practice,” Professor Kwon (Research Professor at the Seoul National University Asia Center / Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge) reflected on his long-standing intellectual commitments in the field of Korean studies and proposed new directions of reflection necessary to re-envision its horizons in the 21st century. The event, chaired by Professor Jaeho Kang (Department of Communication, SNU), took place at the IBK Communication Center and drew a full audience of over forty participants, including Future Team researchers, fellow scholars, and graduate students.

In his lecture, Professor Kwon underscored the importance of a post-divisional approach that transcends disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences and fosters closer integration with the humanities. He emphasized that dismantling rigid academic walls and cultivating integrative thinking are essential to advancing the future of global Korean studies. Echoing themes from his essay on the “Post-Divisional Social Sciences,” he highlighted the necessity of an interdisciplinary framework in which free interpretation and rigorous analysis coexist. This, he argued, provides a crucial point of orientation for envisioning 21st-century Korean studies—one that seeks a convergent methodology bridging social sciences and humanities around the axis of area studies.