The Asian Studies Center and the Department of Anthropology invite you to talk with Dr. Nancy Abelmann, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research—Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields and Harry E. Preble Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In this talk Dr. Abelmann will think about the changing aesthetics of desire and social mobility. She will consider the porous boundary between the radically normative and potentially transgressive in South Korea today. She tunes into the adult lives of the now adult children of women featured in her earlier work on South Korea’s developmentalist mothers; as well as memoirs written by early study abroad mothers. She will also take up several cultural texts, including the blockbuster novel, Please Take Care of My Mother; and the 2004 film, My Mother the Mermaid.