In this episode, Ryan has the pleasure of interviewing Eleana Kim and Kim Stoker during their visit to Melbourne! We chat about adoptee-run creative hubs in Seoul during the early 2000s including Spy Lounge, Kimura Byul, formally known as Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine, a co-founder of GOA'L and by all accounts a social 'force of nature,' critical adoption studies, activism, kinship, and living in Korea as a non 'standard variety Korean.'
'Most don't know precisely when you were born so you can kind of bond over when did you leave, when were you adopted...you find kinship between your agencies, the year of adoption, all of these different ways and...it was also a way for us to create a new kind of way of being Korean' - Stoker.
Eleana Kim is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging.
Kim Stoker is an educator, editor, and poet. Stoker lived and taught in Korea for almost two decades, ten years of which she was actively involved with Adoptee Solidarity Korea, before recently moving back to the States.