Week 2: KPop Demon Hunters: K-pop and Korean Popular Culture
Why K-pop travels, and what its production model reveals about Korean popular culture and identity on a global stage
1 March 2027
KPop Demon Hunters (케이팝 데몬 헌터스) folds a girl-group act into a monster-hunting premise, and the seam between the two — polished performance and genre plot — is exactly where this week lives. K-pop is the most globally visible part of contemporary Korean culture, and this week asks what that visibility is actually made of: a production system, a fandom, and a set of choices about what of “Korea” gets exported and what doesn’t.
Questions#
- Why has K-pop become globally influential, when so much national pop music doesn’t travel?
- How does Korean popular culture combine local identity with globally engineered production?
- What does K-pop reveal about contemporary Korean identity, as opposed to what it’s marketed as revealing?
- Where do entertainment, fandom, technology, and cultural export actually intersect — and where are they just adjacent?
What to take from this week#
- K-pop as an industrial system (training, production, choreography) rather than a genre of song
- fandom as an organised, often transnational, labour of its own
- Hallyu / the Korean Wave, and what “wave” implies about direction and export
- cultural export as policy as much as taste
- globalisation’s effect on what gets made, not just on who watches it
- Korean popular culture beyond K-pop, and what K-pop’s visibility crowds out
Teaching team
- May Rhee — convenor