Tears of Theory demonstrates the value of making storytelling and personal experience integral parts of International Relations (IR) scholarship. Through an examination of the disappearance of Korean Air (KAL) flight 858 in 1987, the book also explores what it means to conduct research in sensitive and difficult settings. According to South Korea, a female secret agent bombed the plane under instructions from the North Korean leadership, killing 115 people. Many unanswered questions emerged and resulted in two rounds of reinvestigations. Taking this case in the context of the ongoing Cold War, Park-Kang presents the story about a researcher, whose life is deeply entangled with the Cold War mystery. The autoethnography-oriented story is based on the author's dramatic research journey of seventeen years on the mysterious female spy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, Asian/Korean Studies, Narrative Studies, Security Studies, Pedagogy and methodology.
Sungju Park-Kang is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku, Finland. Park-Kang was Assistant Professor of International Relations and Korean Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands and the University of Central Lancashire, UK. His work has appeared in Review of International Studies and Millennium: Journal of International Studies, among others. Park-Kang is the author of Fictional International Relations: Gender, Pain and Truth (Routledge).
Prologue Part 1 Confession Combinations Part 2 Enigma Encounters Entanglement Part 3 Destiny Detectives Bibliography
My own favorite fictional sleuths are Icelandic, Japanese, Indian and Singaporean. All of them are storytelling-worriers. So is Sungju-Park-Kang. His investigation of the mysterious downing of flight KAL 858 has taken him into encounters with state intelligence agents, confused students, and unsettled survivors. Accompanying Park-Kang along theorizing's ill-lighted corridors will insure that IR will never look the same. Tears of Theory will stick with you. -- Cynthia Enloe, Author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging Persistent Patriarchy This will be seen as one of the boldest efforts to date to craft a new style of writing about International Relations. An auto-ethnography combined with fiction and theory, the author challenges us to look at the international, not through a safe and reified detachment, but in a thoroughly unsafe way - itself a metaphor for the very unsafe world we purport to study. -- Stephen Chan, OBE, SOAS University of London
