WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This paper argues that housewives were central actors in Korean environmental history, as their domestic labor formed the ethical and material foundations of environmental activism in both North and South Korea. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and gender history, the paper shows how women transformed domestic responsibilities into collective environmental action across the Cold War divide. In South Korea, housewives led detergent boycotts, mercury battery collections, and zero-waste campaigns; in North Korea, women practiced frugality, recycling, and conservation within socialist mobilization and postwar scarcity. Despite ideological differences, women in both Koreas confronted environmental degradation through everyday labor and articulated an ethic centered on care, prevention, and intergenerational responsibility. By foregrounding these marginalized forms of activism, the paper reframes environmental politics beyond Cold War binaries and recenters everyday life as a crucial site of ecological struggle.

The Korean War is often understood as a destructive conflict that hardened Korea’s division and militarized its borders. Yet the war also generated new forms of cross-border interconnection. Beyond the movement of soldiers and state-organized labor, refugees and civilians crossed the North Korea–China border, turning the borderland into a dynamic transnational space. This paper examines how wartime disruption stimulated migration and smuggling. While existing scholarship emphasizes coordination between Pyongyang and Beijing in managing wartime mobility, this study shifts attention to crossings that unfolded beyond direct state control. Drawing on North Korean materials, local Chinese newspapers, and U.S. military documents, the paper argues that much of this movement relied on informal networks and illicit channels. It shows how the conflict intensified older patterns of mobility, embedding refugee flows and smuggling within the longer history of the Korean–Chinese borderlands.

From the 1960s, most countries commonly faced urban crises. Numerous institutions and universities pursued interdisciplinary studies in order to diagnose urban problems. This was also a period in which Cold War exchange programs were actively implemented, and South Koreans figured as important participants in these transnational circuits. Among them, students from different disciplines who specialized in urbanism served as key mediators in conveying South Korean urban problems to the U.S., and the Gwangju Complex Uprising of 1971 (8.10 Seongnam Civil Rights Movement) was shared within these disciplines. Thus, this presentation will globalize Gwangju by introducing untouched sources that had been presented in the U.S. It will seek to analyze how the networks forged by the Cold War and the U.S. as well as the exchanges between core and periphery with emphasis on how these entanglements conditioned the production of knowledge.

After the Korean War, the Yi Seungman government was dually focused on post-war reconstruction and building a strong agriculture-first Korean economy. To accomplish these policies, Community Development, as a relatively novel concept as a top-down but “bottom-up” reorganization of Korean rural life and landscape was attractive to the Korean-American network. This paper examines the Community Development program from its formation to its integration into a growing network of rural-assistance programs by 1963, and how Koreans envisioned the program as an opportunity to showcase “modern” agriculture, forestry, and consumer goods to Korean villages. Americans involved in the program took their experiences to translate their understanding of rural modernity into Korean rural life. The Community Development program represents an intersection between Cold War liberal idealization of rural modernity and visions of rejuvenating Korean rural vitality as a transnational project.