Financialized Ethics: Governing Individual Bankruptcy in South Korea

SEUNG-CHEOL LEE, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded funding in October 2013 to aid research on 'Financialized Ethics: Governing Individual Bankruptcy in South Korea,' supervised by Dr. Elizabeth Povinelli. This research aims to examine South Korea's governance of individual bankruptcy over the past decade, in order to understand how sociality and ethicality are remolded and imbricated with financial neoliberalism. To explore the intricacies of the social realities that surround the issue of personal insolvency, this project started with the focus on the legal process and remedial education for bankrupt individuals, and expanded its scope to the workings of other relevant institutions and agents. The conducted fieldwork has included: 1) archival research on government documents, court records, and poplar representations of the bankrupt issue; 2) following individual bankruptcy cases as they pass through court hearings and the rehabilitation program; 3) participant observation at a leading local NGO concerned with individual bankruptcy; 4) interviews with the bankrupt, bankruptcy attorneys, court officials, and NGO activists. The research found: 1) individual bankruptcy has been problematized as a 'moral' issue, and thus it has served as a point at which economy and morality overlap; 2) during the rehabilitation process, the bankrupt individuals are trained to embody neoliberal responsibility and morality; and 3) the present-day governing practices produce depoliticized effects by mobilizing morality as the antidote to a crisis that requires political/economic solutions.