About The Korea Conference on Education (KCE)

This conference will be held in Songdo International City in Incheon, on the outskirts of Seoul, and in partnership with the University of Utah's Asia Campus, the Incheon Global Campus, and the IAFOR Research Centre at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, Japan.

KCE encourages academics and scholars to meet and exchange ideas and views in a forum stimulating respectful dialogue. This event affords participants an exceptional opportunity for renewing old acquaintances, making new contacts, networking, and facilitating partnerships across national and disciplinary borders.

Songdo is a remarkable new city that is celebrating its 21st anniversary in 2024, and the ambitious project will provide a wonderful venue to highlight the importance of both education and educational institutions, and the arts and humanities at the center of a strong civil society, and alongside its vaunted commitment to be an international city, resonates deeply with IAFOR's commitment to the International, Intercultural, and Interdisciplinary.

South Korea is a country with a long and rich history, but also a difficult one, as a country that has been caught in the middle of regional power struggles for much of its existence, and the cause for a large and influential Korean diaspora. A cultural center of great importance for millenia, in the last century the Korean Peninsula has been subject successively to colonization by the Japanese pre-World War II, and then shortly after, an unwitting venue to a bitter civil war that was also a proxy for superpower rivalry between the US and China/The USSR. The Korean war split the country in two, with the South becoming a rightwing dictatorship, and North Korea becoming a hereditary communist dictatorship. In the 1970s the South became a democracy and underwent a remarkable societal transition to go from one of the poorest nations on earth to become one of the most successful. This incredible energy, driven by its history, and perhaps by its precarity, South Korea is now a multicultural and religiously pluralistic society. A resurgent Korea is now a global cultural powerhouse, known throughout the world for its dramas, film and music production, notably K-pop.

For detailed information, please visit https://kce.iafor.org/