Presentation Schedule
Aging Without Safety Nets: How Queer Grassroots Knowledge Reimagines Education and Belonging in South Korea (103232)
Session Chair: Fajer Bin Rashed
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Friday, 27 March 2026 14:40
Session: Session 2
Room: Live-Stream Room 3
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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Since 2020, South Korea’s shifting immigration policies and debates on social inclusion have unsettled everyday conditions for older non-Korean queer residents, making it harder for them to sustain stable ways of living and learning under conditions of legal invisibility and uneven protections. This study uses iterative thematic coding to analyze immigration guidance documents (e.g., visa renewal criteria and procedural advisories), NGO case reports on LGBTQ+ migrants, and selected digital traces such as Facebook group discussions where long-term queer residents share practical knowledge. Taken together, these materials show how aging, migration, and sexuality intersect with frameworks of multicultural integration.
Many long-term queer residents rely on informal infrastructures of care and everyday education—peer paperwork guidance, rights-literacy efforts, and shared health-navigation networks—to adapt to shifting visa rules, job criteria, and age-based welfare limits. The findings reveal several strategies such as community guidance on securing visas for partners whose same-sex marriages are recognized abroad but not in Korea, and collective approaches for accessing LGBTQ-affirming social services. Here, learning emerges as a means of survival and community governance—an instance of “infrastructural belonging” in which education operates as care, coordination, and everyday integrative living.
Beyond merely documenting exclusion, this study shifts attention to how LGBTQ+ people in South Korea respond to marginalization in creative and relational ways. Specifically, their community-based learning produces informal pedagogies that restore dignity, encourage reciprocity, and make relational forms of belonging possible. A queer lens reframes dominant narratives about integration and offers needed nuance for understanding belonging in a pluralistic society.
Authors:
Robert Hamilton, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea
About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Hamilton studies digital intimacy, citizenship, and transnational belonging across race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary South Korea.
See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule
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