This open access book examines the lived experiences of diasporic Korean youth in light of the transnational flows of South Korean popular culture, known as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Korean Canadian youth and their engagement with the Korean Wave, the book proposes a critical understanding of the interactions between diasporic youth audiences and popular culture. By examining the Korean Wave as diasporic cultural practices rather than the diffusion of national cultural products, the book reveals the diversified ways in which cultural flows are negotiated by audiences who take up relatively ambivalent reception positions between two or more national and cultural contexts. This book expands the scope of transnational audience studies and youth cultural studies by focusing attention on the diasporic media practices of young people.

Kyong Yoon is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada. He has published widely on digital media, South Korean popular culture, migration, and youth culture. He is the author of Digital Mediascapes of Transnational Korean Youth Culture (2020) and a co-author of Transnational Hallyu: The Globalization of Korean Digital and Popular Culture (2021).

“By critically engaging with existing works as well as developing a new story, Kyong Yoon advances a new horizon in Hallyu studies. As the most empirical and analytical work, this book provides fascinating discussions fully supported by ethnographic research, which is not only solid, but also provoking in terms of the quality of execution and academic enthusiasm: highly recommended.” (Dal Yong Jin, Distinguished SFU Professor, Simon Fraser University, Canada)

Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.