Neoliberalism and intercultural popular music education: Chinese and Korean undergraduate students in South Korea

Chinese undergraduate students, the largest group of international students in Korea, study popular music alongside Korean peers who have passed a highly competitive university entrance exam. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the challenges facing Chinese and Korean students, as well as their professors, in Korean popular music departments within contemporary neoliberal society. I adopt an ethnographic approach guided by the central research question: What are the issues and practices in current intercultural popular music education in select Korean universities within the context of neoliberalism? Findings reveal a widening gap between institutional requests to admit more international students and the growing difficulty of students and professors experiencing alienation or victimisation. Building on the analysis, two practices are proposed for consideration: (1) encouraging a greater sense of agency among individual students by supporting them to engage in open discussions and (2) restoring their respective departments as autonomous communities by practising mutual trust and flexibility in relationships among department members and in their interactions with the university administration.