Living in the world of displacement: Social integration in diversity through art education

Abstract

During the past 15 years, there has been an explosion of cross-border mobility of people at the global level. In 2015, the number of forcibly displaced people around the world was 65.3 million, an “unprecedented” (The UN Refugee Agency. http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html). Thus, diversity has become inevitable in society because of mobility, migration, and economical competitions among nations. In this respect, it is important to note that UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity has emphasized cultural diversity as the essential and fundamental factor for humankind as much as biodiversity is necessary for nature (UNESCO in Universal declaration on cultural diversity. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001246/124687e.pdf#page=67, 2001). Cultural diversity equally respects the distinctive features of each culture, its symbolism, values, and phenomena, while it also has the universal value that humanity must pursue as a fundamental right to thrive (UNESCO in The 2005 convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions. Retrieved from , 2005). Therefore, protecting and promoting cultural diversity in society starts with the premise that self-identity is a changeable and unstable concept. This study attempts to conceptualize social integration in diversity in the Korean context. The purpose of this study is to develop vocabularies and themes of social integration based on the meta-analysis of literatures and to draw the implications for cultural diversity through art education. Text mining techniques are used to analyze the abstracts and keywords of articles published during the period of 2002–2017. In the first stage, raw data was constructed by collecting the keywords and abstracts of 549 journal articles. The articles were categorized into three groups with a 5-year term, so as to analyze the overall research trends. After the filtering process, the total number of 1697 key words were generated and used for the social network analysis. As a result of social network analysis, three clusters were developed. Cluster 1 represents the marginalized groups of “others” or “new comers” in Korean society. Cluster 2 sums up the current situation in Korea perfectly with the keywords such as conflict, recognition, and polarization. Cluster 3 gave some insight regarding the future direction of social integration; participation, safe environment, diversity, and sustainability. Through topic modeling, five topics were generated. The overarching meaning of each topic is interpreted based on the co-occurring keywords in each topic. The significant terms are selected so as to differentiate and highlight the main idea of each topic. As a result, three core values emerged; “integration” (topic 1), “ideology” (topic 2), and “identity” (topic 3). These topics can be viewed as the important concepts that should be investigated and pursued for social integration. In addition, two support systems were found; “education” (topic 4), and “policy” (topic 5). It is noteworthy that policy and education should be connected and aligned based on multiculturalism, citizenship, network, recognition, and human rights. The significance of this study can be found in its attempt to construct the theoretical foundation of social integration from the interdisciplinary standpoint. It would provide the concepts and vocabularies to be used in art education practices that would be more widely applicable in the discourse of social integration and cultural diversity.