Call for Abstracts

The Design Korea Research Hub explores Korea’s cultural production at the intersection of art, architecture, and the city, situating Korean practices and discourses within a broader contemporary and global context. The Research Hub aims to provide a platform for scholars, artists, and designers to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and to explore new perspectives on Korea’s cultural and spatial practices. Through this exchange, the Hub seeks to document, reinterpret, and expand diverse narratives emerging from Korea and shaping global audiences.

The theme of this year’s symposium, Rediscovering Koreanness, investigates how Korea’s evolving cultural identity is articulated through design—across art, architecture, urban space, and everyday life. Historically, the notion of Koreanness has often been formed through external pressures and comparisons, particularly in relation to Japan and the West. Moving beyond superficial and defensive debates on style and motif, the symposium examines the broader condition of a society continually negotiating between memory and prevision, intimacy and globality, tradition and innovation. Participants are invited to rediscover Koreanness not as a nostalgic return to the past, but as a critical and creative re-reading of how Korean identity is lived, built, performed, and imagined today, and how these practices contribute to emerging narratives within global cultural discourse.

Rather than a “completed Koreanness” as an answer, we aim to re-examine Koreanness as a process, as an open configuration in which heterogeneous historical, social, and cultural strata intersect—a relational network that is ceaselessly expanded, rebuilt, and reconfigured. To this end, we invite collaboration across various fields, including literature, history, the social sciences, art and media studies, philosophy, and religious studies, in order to examine the “architectures” of our respective disciplines and to pursue conversations that traverse and unsettle their conceptual boundaries.

The symposium welcomes research papers and creative projects at various stages of development (e.g., visual essays, short films, architecture, urbanism, and visual art). We also encourage submissions from a wide range of disciplines—including, but not limited to, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, communication, media studies, and language and literature—that provide contextual or critical depth to the symposium’s focus on architecture, design, and urban planning.  We especially welcome submissions from early career researchers and graduate students (MA/PhD candidates) to make the symposium a supportive platform for emerging voices and experimental work.

Please submit an abstract or project description of up to 250 words, along with a 150-word biographical statement and a brief CV (preferably no more than two pages), by Sunday, March 15, 2026.

All presenters of accepted papers/projects will receive notification by March 30, 2026, and will be provided with further instructions about final submission requirements and presentations.

Local hotel accommodations and meals during the symposium will be provided to all presenters.