Acknowledgements
This volume has emerged from a loose network of interdisciplinary scholars who have crossed paths on several occasions at academic events in East Asia and beyond. The East Asian Regional Conference on Alternative Geography (EARCAG) has been one of these key sites and has been bringing together progressive geographers and urban studies scholars in the region since 1999. More recently, the meetings of a spinoff group from EARCAG, the Geopolitical Economies of East Asia research network (known as EARCAG-GPE) has provided a further forum that has been integral to the development of the approach of many of the chapters in the current volume. In addition, the Center for Asian Cities (CAC) (previously known as the Social Science Korea (SSK) Project on East Asian Cities) at Seoul National University has also played an instrumental role in these activities by helping to host a bid for the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) InterAsian Connections V Seoul Workshop 2016 that the editors used to bring together most of the authors in this volume for the first time. The editors thus wish to thank both SSRC and the individual participants for helping to bring this volume to fruition.
The CAC has been generously funded by a National Research Foundation of Korean Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2017S1A3A2066514) that the editors would like to acknowledge as a source of funding and support for the current volume. In addition, Jamie Doucette also thanks the Korea Foundation, in particular, which funded a Fellowship for Field Research (KF Ref.: 1022000–003867) during the winter and spring of 2016 that allowed him to spend a sabbatical semester at Seoul National University and to develop many of the ideas explored in the introduction to this volume and in his chapter with Seung-Ook Lee.
As mentioned above, the ideas and concepts explored in this volume have been developed through frequent meetings in the East Asian region, and especially the SSRC InterAsian Connections V event in Seoul. The interaction and discussions begun at this event have developed considerably over time, and were first explored in print through a special, double issue of Critical Sociology 44:3 [May] 2018. The chapters by Cartier, Choi and Glassman, Doucette and Park, Friedman, Gottfried, Hae, Hsu, Ip, Kim Chilcote, Kleibert, and Moon in particular are revised, extended and reworked versions of ideas that first appeared in that volume. The other contributions are by scholars who have also participated in the events described above but who were either not present at the SSRC InterAsian Connections workshop or did not participate in the special issue but pursued cognate ideas elsewhere. In particular, we thank Sage