Nathaniel Ming Curran

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of English

Facilitated by the increased availability of affordable broadband Internet, individuals around the world are taking language lessons online from private tutors. A large proportion of online language tutoring takes place through online teaching platforms (OTPs), which are two-sided online markets that connect individual learners and tutors for piece...

This article analyses how three South Korean multicultural-themed reality television programmes discursively produce Koreanness. We ground our study in scholarship on ‘othering’ and the notion of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) and conduct a thematic analysis of the shows. Our findings show that the programmes adopt a Korea-foreign dichotomy that...

With K-pop’s tremendous growth transnationally, scholars have pointed to the industry’s inclusion of singers from different national and ethnic backgrounds, highlighting them as examples of successful glocalization. But there has been little attention paid to how these “foreign” singers, now integrated into the Korean pop music industry, are receiv...

The gig economy is rapidly transforming service-based industries, including online teaching. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people worldwide to work remotely, gig economy teaching generated billions of dollars in revenue and was responsible for millions of lessons per month. Although the global labor market is currently experi...

Across the globe signage which conveys directives regarding appropriate behavior in public, such as ‘Do Not Enter’ signs, is made multilingual in ways that other signage is not. This paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signag...

This article examines the role of production techniques in shaping representations of cultural diversity in South Korean reality television. We first discuss the South Korean government’s evolving guidelines concerning the representation of minorities on television and identify in the guidelines exhortations against discriminatory framing of migran...

This article considers the rapidly expanding online market for English teaching. Drawing on interviews with 11 Filipino online English teachers and the first author's own experiences teaching English online, we examine how teachers feel under the conditions of precarity they experience in the gig economy for language teaching. In addressing the exp...

This article considers how language learners conceptualize their ideal teacher within the context of gig economy language platforms (GELPs). GELPs differ significantly from traditional language learning in that their users are able to change between teachers easily and also select teachers according to a far wider range of criteria than is availabl...

This article examines the rapidly expanding market for online English learning and tutoring. It focuses on the experiences of Black American online English teachers employed on a variety of popular online teaching platforms (e.g. Cambly, italki, PalFish, VIPKid etc.). Specifically, the article considers how specific affordances of online English te...

This article considers the burgeoning online market for language learning as representative of an emerging form of Internet-enabled pop cosmopolitanism. The analysis is based upon a survey-experiment conducted on one of the world’s largest online language learning platforms. Drawing on theories of media globalization, cosmopolitanism and language i...

This chapter explores visual representations of North Korea across a range of American news media outlets. Drawing on literature from visual framing and media studies, it examines the visuals employed in news media discourse surrounding North Korea, focusing on photographs and political cartoons, as well as cover stories from Newsweek magazine. Thi...

North Korea began its metamorphosis from a desperately poor “Hermit Kingdom” in 2011 and evolved into a major proliferator of nuclear weapons by 2017. As the United States and its allies demanded a halt to its missile testing, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump began tossing word grenades with an intensity that alarmed many around the world. In 2018, Kim...

This article examines the intersection of English and coffee in Seoul, South Korea, in order to document how distinction (ala Bourdieu, 1984/2008) functions under the prevailing conditions of neoliberalism. A mere two decades after Starbucks first opened in Korea, high-end specialty coffee shops proliferate. Drawing on photographs of the exteriors,...

Across the world, in many places in which English is not widely spoken, English text often appears on posters, storefronts, billboards, street signs, warning signs, menus, and many other forms of publicly visible written texts. English is often featured alongside one or more additional languages. These signs are typically seen as unremarkable by pa...

This article applies theories of cosmopolitanism-from-below A. Appadurai (2011), F. Kurasawa (2004) to an empirical case. Drawing on participant-observation and interviews conducted over the course of 20 months at a Korean-English Meetup group in the United States, this article explores the practices of an explicitly "cosmopolitan" group. Specifica...

This article conducts a mixed-method content analysis of Chinese and American news media coverage of Google DeepMind’s Go playing computer program, AlphaGo. Drawing on humanistic approaches to artificial intelligence, combined with an empirically rigorous content analysis, it examines the differences and overlap in coverage by the Chinese and Ameri...

This article examines Korean Twitter discourse surrounding Yemeni refugees in South Korea. Sequestered on Jeju Island since their arrival in 2018, the 500 refugees have prompted enormous public debate in Korea, which has until recently defined itself in terms of a mono-ethnic identity. Grounded in the literature on Korean digital feminism, this art...

Drawing on the nascent literature on multiculturalism in Korea, this study explores the influence of viewing South Korean multicultural television content on two attitudinal measures: support for multiculturalism and opposition to sexism. Conducting a survey of South Korean citizens (N = 500) revealed that although heavier viewing of multicultural...

This article introduces LanguaSpeak, a heretofore underexplored digital platform that functions as a market for language learners and teachers. It argues that LanguaSpeak, through both its interface and users' communicative practice, unwittingly reinforces existing language ideologies, particularly around race. In making this argument, the article...

This study examines how people perceive artwork created by artificial intelligence (AI) and how presumed knowledge of an artist's identity (Human vs AI) affects individuals' evaluation of art. Drawing on Schema theory and theory of Computers Are Social Actors (CASA), this study used a survey-experiment that controlled for the identity of the artist...

This article features a content analysis of the entire corpus of news articles published about North and South Korea by five major American news websites in 2016. It provides an insight into the multiple and contradictory ways in which North Korea is framed by the American news media. The study finds that responsibility for the ongoing crisis on th...

Scholarly Abstract Recent advances in AI and machine learning have raised questions about higher-skilled and creative endeavors in which AI might match or even outperform humans. Art is one domain in which advances in AI have caused lines over authorship to become blurred. Coeckelbergh (2017) argues that AI-generated products can be considered "art...

Drawing on the extant literature on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Korea, this essay identifies and discusses three factors that have contributed to Korea’s broadband achievements. The first factor is the Korean state’s long-term objectives, including policy principles. The second is regulatory decisions, including late privat...

While South Korea’s ‘English fever’ has long been the focus of popular and scholarly interest, Chinese has been increasing in popularity in South Korea, concomitant with the rise of China in the global economy. It has even suggested that Chinese might in the future challenge the dominance of English in South Korea. Drawing on a wide range of govern...

Korea has long been recognized as host to an English ‘fever’ (Kim, 2013; J. K. Park, 2009; Shim & Park, 2008), the intensity of which is such that ‘the entire nation, from the president to average citizens, is emotionally and discursively invested in globalization and English language education’ (Lee, 2011: 146). Many universities have minimum TOEI...