Ep. 23: What's your Songbun?

03/20/23 • 41 min

Songbun is your social, political and geographic credit score in North Korea and it is largely based on the merits of your ancestors when Kim Il Sung took power. Sug and Dan explore this weird and convoluted system that the North Korean government uses to subjugate and classify its citizens.
Links:
Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea's Social Classification System
Crossing Borders blog - Songbun: A North Korean's Ultimate Value

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Ep. 22: Squirrel and Hedgehog

Did you know that North Korea has its own animation studio that has worked on movies from around the world (even the US)? Hosts Dan Chung and Sug Shin discuss globalism and how French Canadian Guy Delisle ended up working in a North Korean animation studio, which he details in his book "Pyongyang: A journey in North Korea." The two hosts examine North Korea's most popular cartoon, "Squirrel and Hedgehog," a violent take on the battle between capitalism and communism featuring cute animated creatures.
Article about SEK Studio.

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Ep. 24: Talking Reunification with Professor Minkyung Kim

Reunification of the Korean peninsula is a complicated and technical conversation, which is why we brought Professor Minkyung Kim to talk about it.
Minkyung Kim is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and researches organizational communication and its impacts on community resilience and sustainability. Specifically, she studies organizations serving vulnerable populations and how they leverage and navigate communication processes like inter-organizational networks to maximize their capacity for community impact.
She grew up in South Korea and was trained as a child to spot North Korean spies. She also lived in West Germany at the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her grandfather also grew up in the same town as Kim Il Sung.
Here's a BBC interview with her grandfather, Professor Kim Hyung-suk.

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