Candlelight Vigil Research Articles

Reflections on the 2008 Candlelight Vigil in the Republic of Korea: A Nationalist Movement with Authority, not with Power

Reflections on the 2008 Candlelight Vigil in the Republic of Korea: A Nationalist Movement with Authority, not with Power

A Look at the Changes in Debate Structure in Korea through the Candlelight Vigils

A Look at the Changes in Debate Structure in Korea through the Candlelight Vigils

The Candlelight Girls’ Playground: Nationalism as Art of Dialogy, The 2008 Candlelight Vigil Protests in South Korea

The Candlelight Girls’ Playground: Nationalism as Art of Dialogy, The 2008 Candlelight Vigil Protests in South Korea

Teenage Participants of the 2008 Candlelight Vigil: Their Social Characteristics and Changes in Political Views

Teenage Participants of the 2008 Candlelight Vigil: Their Social Characteristics and Changes in Political Views

Rites of belonging: Grief, memorial and social action

Since the first panels of the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt were officially launched in Sydney in 1988, it has become a widely recognised memorial to people who have died from AIDS. This paper discusses how AIDS Memorials, namely the AIDS Quilt and the annual Candlelight Vigils, have challenged the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS through creating public space for the expression of grief. The paper draws on the idea of ‘social movement frames’, demonstrating how, through the use of symbolic actions and ritualised performance, the political and ideological beliefs of the AIDS movement were expressed not only through articulated argument or attempt at rational persuasion, but through the demonstration of alternative cultural practice.

The Ideological Orientation of 2008 Candlelight Vigil Participants : Anti-American, pro-North Korean Left or anti-neoliberalism?

The Ideological Orientation of 2008 Candlelight Vigil Participants : Anti-American, pro-North Korean Left or anti-neoliberalism?

Coming to Terms with “Unreasonable” Global Power: The 2002 South Korean Candlelight Vigils

In this essay I examine the emergence of the 2002 South Korean candlelight vigils, with a focus on how South Korea's post-Cold War generation collectively defined two Korean girls’ deaths by a US military vehicle as a “national tragedy” and imagined themselves as a collective opponent of perceived Cold War politics. The Internet discourse that Korean “netizens” generated in the wake of the incident shows that Korea's Internet users interpreted and contested US hegemony by inventing local vernacular discourses: they created a collective identity based on shared feelings, invented criteria for reasonableness, and employed nontraditional forms of civic discourse. My analysis calls for attention to the vernacular discursive practices of social actors, who mediate, negotiate, and transform the manner in which global power relationships influence them within a local context.

South Korea

Third-wave marketization in South Korea has changed the social structure of academic knowledge production, revealing the dilemmas and limitations of both traditional and organic public sociology. The emergence of collective intellectuals during the candlelight movement points to an alternative relationship between the researcher and the researched. The candlelight vigils that recently rocked Korean society have pointed to new possibilities for a public sociology of labor. This article discusses the conditions for public labor sociology as a new paradigm based on collective knowledge and argues that when facing increasing professionalization of public sociology, the “crisis of labor” calls for a collective public sociology.

Candlelight Vigil, Mass Media, and Democracy

Candlelight Vigil, Mass Media, and Democracy

Politics of Agora and the Clash of Culture: An Empirical Analysis of 2008 Candle Light Vigil

Politics of Agora and the Clash of Culture: An Empirical Analysis of 2008 Candle Light Vigil

The hidden power of the American dream: why Europe's shaken confidence in the United States threatens the future of U.S. influence

On the day after the tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11, newspapers across Europe proclaimed, We Are All Americans in many different languages, crystallizing the solidarity that so many people around the world felt at that time. But in the years since, that beautiful friendship between Americans and Europeans evaporated, leaving in its place a growing resentment so deep that Americans traveled overseas with Canadian flags stitched to their backpacks while Europeans held candlelight vigils for the removal of President George W. Bush. Dell'Orto argues persuasively that the answer to the question of where do we go from here lies in whether non-Americans keep believing in the American dream. Only if that dream continues to be the root of America's power-as this book shows it has been since the United States first stepped onto the international stage-can America not go the way of all other superpowers in history: down and out. Through analysis of thousands of Western European media articles and government publications about the United States, this book, for the first time, shows what the essence of America is to non-Americans and why that matters to Americans in a very practical way-because it sets limits to what the nation can accomplish. Dell'Orto argues persuasively that Europe's United States is the revered concept America-the exceptional dream that the land of (plenty of) opportunity can really exist, that the experiment in democracy can really work for all those who choose to become Americans. This is a great U.S. asset, since it makes America uniquely powerful in Europe's eyes, infinitely mightier than the march of Marines and McDonald's alone would warrant. Herein lie the uniqueness and the urgency of this book. European public opinion shape's Europe's reaction at least as much as U.S. actions do.

Sorrow and Solidarity: Why Americans Volunteered for 9/11 Relief Efforts

Why did some Americans volunteer to provide relief to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack victims, their families, or workers? This paper uses data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey, a nationally representative sample of adult Americans, which show that 10 percent of Americans volunteered to help victims of the terrorist attacks in some way to address this question. We argue that the act of volunteering in response to September 11 depended on levels of identification with victims of the tragedy. One of the strongest factors was personal identification with victims, which was built through personal networks such as knowing someone who was killed or in danger during the attacks, and through personal feelings of responsibility to help others in need. Identification was also constructed through involvement in social events such as community candlelight vigils that reflected on, framed, and reinforced the significance of the disaster in a communal setting. In addition, identification with victims was built through a patriotic response to the tragedy, which, we argue, motivated Americans to defend the society with which they were emotionally identified and to see victims as part of the American family to which they were obligated to help in times of need. We argue that emotions matter for disaster relief, but that sorrow rather than anger is important for generating identification with victims and thus volunteering for 9/11 relief efforts. These arguments are used to explain gender and political party differences in 9/11 volunteering. Finally, embeddedness in religious congregations promoted volunteering for 9/11 relief efforts.

The Limits of Virtual Memory

In November of 1999, one year after the brutal murder of Rita Hester, a black transsexual woman in Boston, Massachusetts, transgender activists in Boston and San Francisco organized a candlelight vigil in Hester's memory to raise awareness of anti-trans violence. Hester's murder came just six weeks after Matthew Shepherd was killed in Wyoming, a murder case that lit up the U.S. news media and drew international attention. In contrast, Hester's death was overlooked in most mainstream media, and local news sources - even those self-identified as gay - repeatedly referred to Hester as "he” and insisted on using her birth name, putting "Rita” in quotes. Such media representation, along with minimal police response to Hester's case, prompted the initial memorial on the first anniversary of her death. Alongside the vigil, the individuals behind Gender Education and Advocacy (GEA), a national Internet-based non-profit organization, set up a new component on their website, gender.org: "Remembering Our Dead.” The site, which lists information about individuals who have died as a result of anti-trans violence, is intended to call attention to the system of transphobia and to publicly memorialize those lives lost to it. Eight years later, the vigil has grown into an annual, international event. The dual nature of the Day of Remembrance - existing both on the Internet as an ongoing obituary and in "real life” as a collection of local memorial services - makes it an especially rich site for analysis. I am interested here in the Day of Remembrance as a cultural project of public mourning and memorial, a project invested in uniting trans communities through a shared sense of vulnerability and through a seemingly unconstrained mode of communication technology: cyberspace. In this article, I am concerned with the relationships between memorials, nationalisms, and state violences, and how these relationships are at work in the Day of Remembrance specifically. How does a public demonstration of grief also function as a citizen-making project? How might appeals to the state for justice and for human rights reinforce U.S. nationalism, despite the memorial's intent to unite trans people across national borders? Moreover, in what ways is cyberspace cast as the primary tool that enables the memorial project to cross those borders? In pursuing these questions through the specific site of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, I wish to argue broadly that the cyber memorial, while appearing to transcend social and cultural differences, in fact is intimately tied to nationalisms and state violences - indeed, it is the very refusal to critically engage with these concepts, and to attend to the ways that national identities and relations of power unevenly affect trans subjectivities and communities, that helps position the memorial as a nationalist project.

The U.S.–South Korean Alliance: Anti-American Challenges

December 2002 shook up South Korea's conservative establishment and its U.S. ally. Five days before the South Korean presidential election, with a quarter of the electorate still remaining undecided, leaders of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and religious activists staged a massive candlelight vigil in front of Seoul's city hall to protest against “unequal” provisions in South Korea's Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with its U.S. ally. The political rally drew some 40,000 protestors from all walks of life. Moreover, it was only one among many climaxes in a long mobilization drive launched by NGOs and “netizens” since June, when a U.S. armored vehicle driven by Sergeant Fernando Nino and Mark Walker ran over two teenage girls during a military exercise in Hyochonli. That month saw some thirty NGOs establish a national umbrella organization to demand the trial of Nino and Walker under South Korean law. Then, in December, the Catholic, Buddhist, and Protestant religious orders joined in to lend their authority to the protestors by collectively calling for the revision of SOFA to give South Korea “primary jurisdiction” over criminal cases. The radicalhanchongryonuniversity students, too, showed up in protest sites to stir up and escalate anti-American sentiments, regularly raiding U.S. military bases in Uijongbu and Yongsan and even breaking into the U.S. Embassy compound in November. But unlike the past, this intrusion of radicalhanchongryonactivists did not drive away presumably conservative middle-class groups from political rallies. On the contrary, the call for a SOFA revision grew louder after the U.S. military court judged Nino and Walker not guilty of negligent homicide.

Community healing rituals for survivors of rape

The use of rituals for healing purposes is documented in anthropological contexts and within Eastern and Western religions. Therapeutic rituals are used in a variety of clinical social work contexts, most notably with individuals, groups, and families. This article explores the use of therapeutic ritual on a community level with survivors of rape. This collective context promotes intrapersonal and interpersonal healing, challenges rape myths, and allows the expression of group values and shared meanings. The candlelight vigil and the stone‐throwing ceremony, two community healing rituals developed by the author, are presented as a method to promote individual and community growth.

Candlelight pay award vigil for London nurses

Candlelight pay award vigil for London nurses