[Two Talks] Korean Tuna Fisheries in American Samoa and Women's Equality in Development

Mr. Gugbo Shim (left) and Ms. Smin Shin

Presentations of Visiting Researchers

Thursday, November 5, 2026
4:00 PM

Bunche Hall, Room 10383

Presentation Information 

1. Korean Tuna Fisheries in American Samoa: Maritime Networks, Migration, and Transnational Capital 

Presented by Mr. Gugbo Shim  

This presentation examines the relationship between the growth of the Korean distant-water tuna fishery and American Samoa through historical, and cultural contexts. With its strategic location in the South Pacific and the natural deep-water harbor of Pago Pago, American Samoa came under U.S. sovereignty at the turn of the twentieth century, subsequently transitioning from a U.S. naval outpost to a tuna-processing hub connected to the postwar America market. Amid this transformation, Korean distant-water fishing fleets expanded into South Pacific tuna fisheries in the late 1950s, utilizing Pago Pago as a hub for catch offloading, provisioning, repairs, anchorage, and temporary stays. The repeated stay of Korean crews and fishing-industry personnel led to sustained contact with Samoan society, with some eventually settling in American Samoa and forming a Korean community. Although the number of Korean residents in American Samoa declined with the subsequent downturn and restructuring of Korea's distant-water fishing industry, connections between the two regions persisted in altered forms. In particular, Dongwon Industries' acquisition of Starkist in 2008 demonstrates how this relationship was reorganized from a network centered on fishing vessels and crews into one increasingly driven by transnational corporations and capital. Drawing on historical documents and fieldwork conducted in American Samoa, this presentation reinterprets the history of Korean distant-water fishing beyond a narrative of national industrial development, situating it within the broader history of Pacific maritime, industrial, and social networks connecting Korea and American Samoa.  

2. Women's Equality in Development 

Presented by Ms. Smin Shin 

The talk argues that very ambiguity of the concept of women's equality is what allowed the Cold War's disparate stakeholders-the American aid-giver, the Korean aid-recipient state, and the Korean women who were aid's intended objects-to lay claim, each after its own fashion, to a single discourse of women's equality. In 1975, the U.S. State Department, acting through the United States Agency for International Development (hereafter USAID), and its "Women in Development" (WID) program, approved a three-year grant of fifty thousands dollars to Ewha Womans University (hereafter Ewha). With this funding, Ewha established Korea's first women's studies course in 1977. The course's founding was made possible by the international ascendances of the language of women's equality in these years, yet USAID, the Korean government, and women's university that hosted the course understood that language in fundamentally different terms. At stake, above all, was whether women's participation in development was itself synonymous with equality, or rather a precondition equality still had to satisfy. This talk shows that the state called women into development even as it left the underlying structure of the gendered division of labor untouched.  

This talk demonstrates that the aid-recipient state did not simply inherit the aid-giver's discourse but actively reworked it to its own ends. Third World women intellectuals occupied the double position of aid's object and re-interpreter of its discourse, while that the women's university, an institution beneath the level of the state, functioned as a genuine agent in the Cold War negotiation between American aid and Korean government.  

Mr. Gugbo Shim received his bachelor's degree in International Politics and Communication Studies from Handong Global University and his master's degree in Sociology from Seoul National University, where he also completed his doctoral coursework. His research draws primarily on qualitative methods, including interviews and field work, and focuses on identifying and analyzing the underlying factors that shape distinctive forms of collective behavior in Korean society and the mechanism in which they are manifested. He is currently preparing his doctoral dissertation on the historical transformation of South Korea's distant-water fisheries, with particular attention to questions of sovereignty and power, mobility, and interspecies relations that have emerged throughout their historical trajectory.    

Ms. Smin Shin is a Ph.D student in the Department of History at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) and a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) through a fellowship from the National Research Foundation of Korea. She received her M.A. from SKKU in 2024 with a thesis titled "The Controversy and Consequences of the Women's Suffrage and Electoral Gender Quota during the Period of the United States Military Administration." Throughout her academic career, Shin has focused on how tangible and intangible women's spaces and gender roles operate within Cold War contexts. 

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies, Asia Pacific Center