Presentation short abstract

In South Korea, native seeds now circulate across ecological and administrative regions through grassroots exchanges. These movements unsettle origin-based notions of nativity. This paper examines how activists redefine nativity by shifting from adaptedness to adaptability.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how the concept of “native” seeds is being reshaped by seed-saving activists in South Korea. While nativity has traditionally been defined through adaptedness—understood as long-term ecological and cultural fit within a particular place—native seeds today circulate widely across diverse ecological and administrative regions through grassroots exchanges, as fewer farmers are able or willing to keep cultivating them. Such movements, however, unsettle the normativity of territoriality: the seeds must remain “native” despite their geographic transference; otherwise, the very rationale of conservation becomes unstable. One response to this tension—native seeds can no longer remain “native” while still needing to be categorized as such—has been to modify the concept of nativity itself. Since the late 2010s, grassroots organizations have attempted to redefine nativity to accommodate problems encountered in practice, such as the loss of identity during transference or uncertainty surrounding the genealogy of seed stocks, including their originals. These redefinitions tend to be operational and oriented toward what can be verified within shorter time frames—often less than a decade. Historical verifiability becomes less central, while phenotypic stability gains importance, and adaptability rather than adaptedness comes to be treated as the defining feature. One consequence of this principle-based redefinition is the reification and transferability of ecological and contextual characteristics themselves—rendering seeds a kind of “nature” that can be moved around.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines beekeeping in South Korea’s largest black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) honey forests as a honey-flow commons, showing how mismatched movements of state, humans, and bees generate distinctive regimes of access, conflict, and obligation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes beekeeping in South Korea’s largest black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia, locally known as “acacia”) nectar forests, located in North Gyeongsang Province, as a field of “commons politics” produced by non-coincident movements of state, humans, and bees. First, it traces how, in the wake of the Korean War, the state planted fast-growing black locust to stabilize devastated hillsides, unintentionally creating extensive nectar landscapes that later became the basis for local festivals, regional specialties, and rural livelihoods. Second, it examines how bees’ aerial foraging overrides land-ownership boundaries that are strictly enforced for humans. While placing hives inside privately created nectar stands is not permitted, it is common practice to set hives on nearby fields, yards, or public land and allow bees to collect nectar from privately owned forests; in such cases, compensation goes not to the owners of the nectar forest but only to those who host the hives on their property. Third, the paper follows seasonal migrations of mobile beekeepers from regions where large nectar forests are scarce into this black locust zone, showing how they are framed not simply as mobile beekeepers but as predatory or “worse” users of the commons. These moral judgments reveal how interregional conflict shapes ideas of legitimate access to honey as a commons. By tracking these intersecting movements, the paper reconceptualizes beekeeping as a multispecies practice that exposes frictions between property, mobility, and more-than-human ecologies in contemporary South Korea.

Presentation short abstract

Jeju was rebranded as "Hawaii of South Korea"from the 1960s through developmental plans that centered on citrus farming supported by diasporic gifts from Koreans in Japan. This presentation shows how traveling citrus trees played a pivotal role in reshaping Jeju as a Cold War developmental frontier.

Presentation long abstract

Jeju Island was long impoverished and marginalized within Korea. Its devastation deepened with the 1948 April 3 Massacre, leaving the island with few viable paths to recovery. Reconstruction did not begin in earnest until the 1960s, when Park Chung Hee’s developmental regime designated Jeju as both a citrus-farming hub and a tourist frontier—the so-called “Hawaii of Korea.” During this period, diasporic Koreans, many displaced during and after colonial rule and state violence, pooled resources to purchase citrus saplings as gifts for their homeland. Sent as acts of return and care, these saplings traveled alongside grafting techniques, fertilizers, and horticultural expertise, creating a transnational postcolonial agricultural circuit linking Jeju and Japan.

Drawing on the last two years’ archival and ethnographic research on the movement of saplings agricultural inputs, and diasporic gifts, this presentation examines how citrus trees, through their botanical agency, have transformed Jeju’s economy, ecology, and everyday life across six decades of postwar reconstruction and Cold War development. Taking root in volcanic soil once deemed unsuitable for farming, these traveling trees reorganized rural labor, reshaped landscapes, and offered farmers a temporal anchor—a life pillar whose seasonal cycles structured care, obligation, and future-making. Their growth intertwined with farmers’ own life rhythms, generating a “citrus island” where human and botanical futures were grafted together. Traveling trees thus emerge not only as a means of production but also as an aim of production—living agents and archives that made new economic, ecological, and political possibilities imaginable on the island.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines the political dynamics surrounding the mountain paths commons within the framework of South Korea’s national park system, problematizing the noncritical notion of mountain environment and instead arguing for attending to concrescent encounters between human and nonhuman entities.

Presentation long abstract

In hilly, mountainous, or other uneven terrains, human locomotion typically follows the most efficient route of progression. This phenomenon aligns with what Cae Rodrigues (2018) terms “ecomotricity,” a mode of bodily movement in/with nature wherein the boundary between humans and nature becomes indistinct. Through ongoing interactions among human body parts, soil or rock substrates, and diverse flora and fauna encountered along the way, the ecomotor traversing of an undeveloped mountain trail engenders a process of concrescence—that is, a co-creative coming together of all these elements. Furthermore, such trails function as a form of commons, collaboratively and consistently shaped by the cumulative footsteps of all visitors.

This paper investigates the political dynamics surrounding such mountain path commons within the framework of South Korea’s national park system. Authorities at Seoraksan National Park classify those concrescent interactions during hikes as illegal, alleging them to be posing threats to what they call “mountain environment.” Hardly however, do environmental scientists mention the soaring number of park visitors and bother to calculate the amount of carbon emission induced from those visits. The paper argues that, though equally culpable in the broader scheme, the practices of concrescent hiking through an unauthorized path inside the park may engender an ethico-onto-epistemology that unsettles the solidified naturalness central to the spectacular management of natural monument, ultimately bringing attention to the potentiality of alliance between human and non-human entities.