Searching for Alternatives: going beyond criticism

Abstract

This paper introduces the trend at the academia of Korean History in 2014 and overviews the research outcomes from 2013 to 2014 on pre-modern history of Korea. This paper also proposes alternative solutions for problems created by a mass quantitative increase in academic papers, which is one of the main issues at the academia.BR Korean history textbooks and discussions about ‘history of East Asia’ have been the most important issues in the academia in 2014. For the issue of history textbooks, academic debates related to history education are demanded thus not to be distorted as a political issue.BR In the future, while vigorous discussions not only among the researchers of eastern and western history, and also among pre-modern and modern-comtemporary history should be urged on the issues of East Asian history, the efforts of pre-historians are especially required.BR After arranging research results from 2013 to 2014 based on chronological categories (ancient, Goryeo, early-Joseon, late-Joseon), it has been revealed that there are new approaches to replace the conventional opinions. This may imply that this is the right time to seek for new paradigm of studies of Korean history. However, such new attempts should hardly forsake the entire context of Korean history, and thus emphasizing a syntactic perspective is more than necessary.BR Regarding the concerns about recent mass production of articles, I have counted the number of papers which were presented in 2013 and 2014 and the number of their presenters. As a result, most of researchers presented less than 1.5 papers in each year, and around 10% of them were publishing a larger volume of papers than usual. This paper encourages an alternative policy to create environments in which researchers can concentrate on publishing ‘qualitative papers’ while avoiding quantitative competition.