Visiborders, Invisible Resistance:

Walking Pyeongtaek’s Militarized Landscapes

-Exploring the entanglement of Cold War legacies and contemporary everyday life through visual sociology

🌐 Pyeongtaek Field Excursion

: IVSA 2025 P0st-Conference Program

Militarized Landscapes, Visual Resistance
Pyeongtaek is one of Korea’s most symbolically and structurally militarized cities, shaped by Cold War geopolitics and decades of U.S. military presence.
This excursion offers participants an opportunity to visually interrogate the intersections of power, gender, resistance, and memory within a city scarred by military expansion and community displacement.

Through guided visits to historical villages, museums, and contested urban spaces, this program aims to reveal how militarization inscribes itself into the landscape—and how communities resist and remember.

📅 Program Overview

Date: Sunday, June 29, 2025
Departure: 8:30 AM, Yulgok Hall Main Entrance, Ajou University
Duration: 5–6 hours (Return by 2:30 PM)
Capacity: 60 participants (priority given to IVSA 2025 registrants; 2 buses available)
Fee: $70 USD / 70,000 KRW
- Includes professional guide, breakfast, and lunch

Recommended Items: Camera or smartphone for visual documentation

🧭Field Course Itinerary

1.Daechuri Peace Village (Hwangsaeul Memorial Hall & Local History Museum)

- Center of grassroots resistance to U.S. base expansion
- Explore memorials and exhibitions documenting displacement, protest, and community rebuilding

2. Doduri Village (Periphery of U.S. Base)

- Site of invisible ecological damage caused by militarization
- A rural lens into uneven environmental burden and structural silence

3. Anjeong-ri (Sunshine Social Welfare Center & Camptown Women’s Peace Museum)

- Archiving gendered histories of camptown women, postcolonial violence, and state neglect
- Alley tour to observe lingering visual traces of a militarized sexual economy

🔍 Visual Sociological Themes in Pyeongtaek

Spatial Power and Cold War Urbanism
Military bases and their enduring reshaping of local geographies
Resistance and Grassroots Memory
Community activism and memorialization in Daechuri
Gender, Militarism, and Postcolonial Violence
Camptown women’s experiences as intersections of exploitation and agency
Environmental Inequality and Visual Erasure

Doduri’s silenced landscape of ecological degradation

📋 Participant Support and Logistics

Breakfast: Sandwich and bottled water provided at departure
Lunch: Sandwich options served at the Sunshine Social Welfare Center (vegan options available)
Storage: Secure luggage space available on the bus
Accessibility: Wheelchair support and dietary accommodations available upon request

📢 Final Invitation to the Field

Walking through Pyeongtaek means encountering more than just physical sites

—it is an immersion into the politics of space, memory, and survival under militarized conditions.

From the rice fields of Daechuri to the alleys of Anjeong-ri, this journey invites you to read the landscape as a visual text of contested histories.

Bring your lens. Walk the terrain. Witness the invisible.

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