Abstract The sinking of MV Sewŏl, on April 16, 2014, claimed 304 lives, 250 of whom were high school students on a field trip to Jeju Island. The activist movement in the Sewŏl Disaster’s wake, calling for remembrance of the victims, investigation into the Disaster, and accountability, has witnessed mobilization on a scale unprecedented for post-disaster activism in Korea, and continues to this day. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among the bereaved families of Sewŏl Disaster victims and allied activists, this article considers Sewŏl activism as an instantiation of the shifting tenors and tactics of political action. Focusing on the heterogeneity of its constituents, the softer, cultural modes of resistance through which the movement is diffused, and how the boundary between “citizens” and “activists” has been blurred, this article proposes a refined understanding of what it means to “act” in the political arena of contemporary South Korea.
S. Park (2026) studied this question.