Employing a “lens of simultaneity,” Park advances a strikingly original framework for analysis. Drawing upon and extending the existing literature on globalization and migration, he demonstrates how Korean international students simultaneously occupy unequal and incongruent social statuses in both South Korea and the U.S. In doing so, he provides a rich and nuanced account of the lives, experiences, and transnational practices of these international students that is attentive to race, class, and gender.

Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley

Sociology and communication studies have been slow to account for the decades-long trend of Asian international students taking US universities, and transnational life, by storm. Not only does Park fill this nagging lacuna on globalization and the bottom-up inequalities that attend, he transforms the literature by centering race in a largely aracial literature and by intersecting race and class to grasp the “transnational capitalist class."

Nadia Y. Kim, Loyola Marymount University

Sung-Choon Park’s When Foreign Elites Encounter Racism presents a vivid and illuminating account of how young elites from South Korea are marginalized as foreign students in the United States through racist practices, and how they navigate profound status inconsistencies in their daily lives, online and off, in Korea and the United States. Park presents a striking account of his subjects’ worlds as he illustrates a great deal about the race and racism, class formation, and media and globalization in South Korea, the United States, and far beyond.

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, New School for Social Research