For our second gathering of Korea Peace Now!’s Intergenerational Learning and Healing Series, Jungwon Kim and Yoon Ra debrief “Unbind Your Heart: Korean Han / Grief Transmutation Ceremony,” a KPNGN action held on July 27, 2023, the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, in Washington, DC. where participants transmuted collective, generational grief and rage, 한 / Han, into a wellspring of righteous anger and strength to call for an end to the Korean War. Both speakers will discuss the process of blending grassroots community organizing with ritual, performance, and song in order to transform and counter state violence and war-making. They also share about their work more broadly and why we must prioritize community, ritual, and spiritual resistance in organizing and narrative building practices.
Jungwon Kim is a multi-disciplinary communications strategist and advocate who has chronicled frontline environmental and human rights movements for the past two decades. She served for nine years as head of the creative & editorial team at the Rainforest Alliance and for eight years as the editor of Amnesty International, a quarterly human rights print magazine (circ. 300,000). She has also worked as a journalist for newspapers, magazines, and nationally syndicated public radio programs Jungwon is the board chair of Peace Is Loud and a board member of the Fund for Public Health NYC. She is a writer, mother, and co-founder of two BIPOC-centered sanghas.
Yoon Ra is a trans, non-binary grassroots documentary filmmaker and cultural organizer creating counter-narrative media with sex worker mutual aid groups: Red Canary Song (New York, Turtle Island) and Scarlet Cha Cha (Paju, Korea). Red Canary Song centers base-building with migrant massage workers and Asian sex workers through a labor rights, migrant justice, and PIC abolitionist framework. Red Canary Song believes that the full decriminalization of sex work is necessary for the safety and survival of massage workers and trafficking survivors. Scarlet Cha Cha has been organizing direct actions to protect the livelihoods and workplaces in Yongjugol, a red light district village first created to service an American military base in Paju, South Korea. Yoon is currently a campaign fellow with U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), collaborating with BDS Korea to build international pressure against HD Hyundai’s selling of bulldozers and excavators to Israel. They plan on creating the media strategies for the campaign to reach a wider U.S. and English speaking audience.