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Although Paul Ricoeur never systematically developed a philosophy of refugees, his 1996 and 1997 writings on foreigners provide significant philosophical resources for constructing one. Drawing on his experience mediating for undocumented African workers in Paris, Ricoeur proposed a “phenomenology of belonging” that distinguishes three categories of foreigners-visitors, immigrant workers, and refugees each requiring a different level of hospitality. He critically observed an asymmetry in how citizens take their own nationality for granted while reflexively excluding others. Moving beyond this descriptive stage, Ricoeur grounded his approach in three key strategies for destabilizing settled identity: symbolic memory of our own former strangerhood, imagination of ourselves as the other, and the trial of translation between languages. These strategies reveal the inherent vulnerability and contingency of personal and national identity from within, thereby opening interior space for welcoming the stranger. Unlike Arendt, who sought expanded political communities, or Derrida, who championed unconditional hospitality, Ricoeur pursued a distinctive path, eroding the self-sufficiency of identity from the inside to create room for the other. Ultimately, he proposed the concept of “similitude” (resemblance) as a middle ground between rigid identity and absolute difference (or other), advocating an ethics of hospitality rooted in the recognition that the other is “l’autre mon semblable” (my fellow human), thereby envisioning “habiter ensemble” (cohabitation) beyond the binary of citizen and foreigner.

This article examines the Netflix animated film K-pop Demon Hunters as a critical case study in the narrative convergence of K-pop, traditional Korean motifs, and global animation grammar. Focusing on the concept of “kinetic imagination,” this study analyzes how the film strategically mobilizes performance, ritual, and movement to construct a hybrid narrative structure. It pays particular attention to the film’s three-act narrative architecture, character arcs notably the protagonist Rumi’s evolution as a "flawed hero" and the ritualistic equation of performance and gut (traditional shamanic ritual). Furthermore, this article explores how Seoul’s urban landmarks function as narrative mise-en-scène, anchoring a fantastic K-pop world within a concrete urban sensorium. By situating the film within the broader formation of K-pop as a transmedia storyworld, this study argues that K-pop Demon Hunters exemplifies a creative convergence model where local traditions and global genres are integrated at the levels of story, character, and visual imagery. Ultimately, this research provides a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanisms of K-pop brand storytelling in the global media environment, shifting the focus from industry-centric perspectives toward a deeper examination of narrative and aesthetic craft.

This study analyzes the ways in which contemporary Taiwanese social issues are depicted in three films The Can of Anido, 942, and The Sleep out of the five segments in Ten Years Taiwan. Specifically it examines the violation of the Tao people’s ecological sovereignty in terms of the Taiwanese government’s nuclear waste disposal and the indigenous people’s reactions in The Can of Anido; through 942, it discusses what visual strategies the film employs in order to criticize the Taiwanese society’s connivance in the discrimination faced by the migrant workers as subalterns; lastly, the discussion on The Sleep reveals that its science-fiction setting despite its future temporality allegorically addresses Taiwan’s current issues. While previous studies largely claim that this omnibus film is apolitical and eschews addressing the intimidating presence of China, this research argues that, despite its ambiguous visual language, The Sleep covertly references Cross-Strait relations, which have served as a source of trauma for the sovereignty-aspiring Taiwanese. This is evident in the continuous metaphorical allusion in the film to Taiwan’s uncertain future, even though it refrains from directly mentioning China. Viewed through the lens of Cross-Strait relations and Taiwanese identity, this study concludes that the themes of The Can of Anido and 942, which initially seem unrelated to sensitive Cross-Strait politics, are ultimately intertwined with the issue of Taiwan’s identity crisis allegorized in The Sleep. In other words, all of the three segments, The Can of Anido, 942, and The Sleep, critically visualize the obstacles blocking Taiwan’s entry into a multicultural society, one that would legitimize Taiwan’s independent existence.

This paper explores the cinematic strategies in Sai Yoichi’s film Blood and Bones (2004) by focusing on visibility and political legibility. Since the globalization of Zainichi cinema and literature, recent scholarship has often celebrated post- and anti-essentialist representations of Zainichi identity. Blood and Bones, in this context, has mostly been discussed through the connection between its representation of violence and Zainichi identity. However, cinematic visibility does not necessarily produce political legibility. This paper argues that Sai’s adaptation renders Zainichi identity spectacularly visible while making the historical and institutional conditions that produced it politically illegible. By tracing the use of diasporic narrative in the Kimigayo Maru opening sequence, the reconstruction of tongne as an enclosed memoryscape, and the spectacularization of Kim Shunpei’s body, I demonstrate how minority representations can become politically contained by the very process of cinematic visibility. To make this case, I read Sai’s film alongside Yang’s 1998 novel, situating both within the political history that produced the Zainichi community and identity. This paper contributes to Zainichi studies by presenting Sai’s film adaptation as a case in which moving away from a fixed Zainichi identity may make Zainichi representations more readily accommodated within the Japanese cultural imagination at the cost of political legibility.

This article reads WALL-E (2008) as a post-9/11 American narrative. Focusing on the film’s narrative trajectory from Earth to outer space and back to Earth, it argues that the return to Earth functions not merely as a physical restoration of land but as a symbolic return to home, homeland, and ultimately America. The study begins by addressing a central question: why do the descendants of humanity who have never inhabited Earth and possess no lived memory of it immediately recognize it as ‘home’ and speak of ‘returning’? To answer this question, the study examines how the film constructs Earth as an imagined homeland. Drawing on American cultural history and post-9/11 homeland discourse, it demonstrates how WALL-E transforms a place beyond lived experience into a site of belonging, attachment, and national return. In this respect, the film reproduces a post-9/11 ideological structure in which land, home, and homeland become inextricably intertwined. By interpreting the second half of WALL-E through the lens of homeland discourse, this paper argues that the vision of reclaiming Earth reflects broader American desires for security, belonging, and national renewal in the aftermath of 9/11. Ultimately, WALL-E emerges as a post-9/11 American narrative that reimagines Earth as homeland and projects contemporary national desires onto a futuristic setting.

Jun-hee Han's Coin Locker Girl (2015) challenges the traditional focus of Korean noir on patriarchal gangster systems and masculine violence by centering its narrative on the mother-daughter relationship between two powerful female figures, Il-yeong and Woo-hee. Rather than presenting social anxieties solely through external conflicts and violent confrontations, the film relocates them into the intimate sphere of familial and interpersonal relationships. This article examines the potential of female noir through a psychoanalytic reading of Coin Locker Girl, employing Melanie Klein's good/bad breast theory and Peter Blos's concept of the second individuation process. By analyzing Il-yeong's hunger, her relationship with Woo-hee as a maternal figure, and her psychological development, this study argues that the film transforms material anxieties into conflicts over nourishment, dependency, and identity. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that female functions as a hybrid form of postmillennial Korean noir, in which the socioeconomic anxieties produced by neoliberal transformations are relocated from the masculine social order to the intimate sphere of familial and interpersonal relationships. Rather than merely replacing the masculine framework of traditional noir, female noir expands the possibilities of Korean noir by articulating social criticism through intimate psychological struggles.

This study examines acoustic differences between male and female speakers of French across multiple phonetic dimensions, including fundamental frequency (F0), F0 variability, harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR), and vowel formant frequencies. Thirty-three native speakers of French, 16 male and 17 female speakers, read French sentences. F0, F0 variability, and HNR were measured across all vowel intervals to capture speech-level pitch characteristics and vocal periodicity, while F1 and F2 were analyzed for the corner vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ to examine vowel space patterns. The results showed significant sex differences across acoustic measures. Female speakers exhibited higher F0, greater F0 variability, and higher HNR than male speakers, indicating higher pitch, greater F0 modulation, and greater vocal periodicity. Formant frequencies also differed by speaker sex, but these differences were vowel-dependent. Female speakers had significantly higher F1 and F2 values than male speakers for /a/ and /i/, whereas no significant sex difference was found for /u/ in either F1 or F2. These findings suggest that sex-dependent acoustic differences in French are multidimensional and cannot be explained solely by physiological differences between sexes. The results are discussed in light of physiological constraints, vowel-specific acoustic and articulatory properties, and potentially sociophonetic factors.

This paper aims to investigate the semantic differences between the French near-synonyms type and genre through a corpus-based distributional analysis and explains these differences in terms of categorization strategies. Although both words denote “type” or “kind” and are often considered interchangeable, actual language use reveals distinct collocational and distributional patterns. Using a large-scale French corpus from Sketch Engine, this study analyzes major syntactic environments of type and genre, including type/genre de + N constructions, modifier combinations, and subject/object positions, based on logDice and ΔlogDice measures. The results show that type tends to function as an objective and structural classificatory category, whereas genre reflects a more interpretive and convention-based categorization associated with cultural and discourse contexts. These differences appear consistently across syntactic environments. This study demonstrates that corpus-based distributional analysis provides an effective approach for explaining semantic distinctions between near-synonyms in terms of categorization patterns.

This study analyzes how Korean and Japanese newspaper editorials organize information in their headlines and leads. The dataset comprises 5,880 editorials (2,940 per language) from six major dailies published between August 2019 and December 2024.All 2,940 Japanese editorials uniformly adopt a ‘keyword + space + claim’ headline structure, with keywords invariably composed of bare lexical noun phrases. In contrast, only 22.4% of Korean editorials present keywords as lexical noun phrases; the majority embed narrative context and evaluative orientation within the keyword itself. In the lead analysis, both countries showed a predominance of situational reporting. However, Japanese leads favored time-oriented reporting (72.3%) combined with commentary, while Korean leads were dominated by action-oriented reporting (58.9%) in standalone form, deferring commentary to the body text. This distributional difference was statistically significant (χ² = 1615.68, p < .001, Cramér's V = .524). These findings demonstrate that Japanese editorials employ a ‘context-first’ strategy sequentially layering reference, temporal framing, and commentary from headline to lead whereas Korean editorials adopt an ‘action-first’ strategy, front-loading evaluative framing in the headline and centering the lead on agents' actions. The study provides empirical evidence that differences in information organization between Korean and Japanese editorials are already systematically operative at the introductory stage.

This study examines the positioning of the label koyloy ‘puppet’ in inter-Korean relations from 1948 to early 2024. Drawing on Positioning Theory (Davies & Harré 1990/1999), it investigates how South Korea’s pwukkoy ‘North Korean puppet’ and North Korea’s namcosen koyloy (‘South Korean puppet’) functioned as reciprocal acts of interactive other-positioning rather than merely as derogatory labels. Based on a qualitative discourse analysis of representative institutional and media texts from both Koreas, the study explores how these naming practices assigned particular rights and duties to the opposing side and reproduced antagonistic storylines over time. The analysis shows that the label ‘puppet’ consistently positioned the other side as a politically dependent and non-autonomous actor while reinforcing each regime’s own legitimacy. The historical development of these reciprocal naming practices reveals that hostile discourse between the two Koreas was sustained not only through categorical differentiation but also through the interactional production and reproduction of positions. In this sense, the study argues that the repeated use of ‘puppet’ gradually became a conventionalized positioning trigger (e.g., Kim 2020) that activated historically sedimented positions and storylines. By tracing the historical development of hostile naming practices, this study contributes to a linguistic understanding of legitimacy competition and hostile discourse in inter-Korean relations.

This study examines how Korean and Chinese represent the same achievement events differently and investigates which stage of an event is highlighted in each language. Although many achievement verbs have corresponding forms across the two languages, differences emerge in actual usage. For example, Korean expressions such as “I searched for it for a long time but could not find it” or “I kept persuading him, but it did not work” are natural, whereas their direct Chinese counterparts are often unacceptable. This study explores the source of this contrast. Previous studies have generally characterized achievement events as event types involving the attainment of a result. However, actual language use shows that the process leading to the result also plays an important role in event interpretation. Based on this observation, the present study analyzes achievement events in terms of three stages: the preparatory stage (P-stage), the final point (F-stage), and the result stage (R-stage), and compares how Korean and Chinese profile these stages. The analysis focuses on four pairs of corresponding verbs: to get off work(출근하다) / xiàbān( ), to search for(찾다) / zhǎo(dào)( ( )), to persuade(설득하다) / shuōfú( ), and to solve(해결하다) / jiějué( ). The comparison is based on four diagnostic criteria: duration expressions, repetitive expressions, auxiliary constructions, and result negation. The results show that Korean tends to foreground the preparatory stage of an event, allowing the same verb to be used even when result attainment remains unspecified. As a result, expressions followed by result denial are often acceptable. Chinese, by contrast, tends to distinguish more clearly between the process leading to a result and the attainment of the result itself through verb choice, resultative constructions, word order, and other grammatical devices. Once result attainment is encoded, subsequent denial of the same result becomes difficult. The contrast is also evident in auxiliary constructions. Korean can extend or elaborate the preparatory stage through constructions such as seoldeukhae boda‘try to persuade’, haegyeolhae gada‘move toward solving’, and chajanaeda‘find out’. Chinese, on the other hand, typically relies on resultative complements, adverbs, or additional syntactic elements to distinguish between the process and the result. The findings suggest that the difference between Korean and Chinese is not simply a matter of lexical meaning. Rather, it reflects a difference in which stage of an achievement event is most prominently represented in discourse. Korean tends to make the preparatory stage more visible, whereas Chinese more directly encodes the final point and the result stage. This perspective provides a useful account of interpretation differences between corresponding expressions in the two languages and offers implications for Korean language education.