A Study on Understanding Placeness and Immigrant-related Social Issues in Rural Areas and Determining the Overarching Characteristics

Abstract

Background and objective: The influx of foreign workers has also increased in South Korea over the past 20 years due to the global labour movement between countries and the labour shortage caused by the aging of South Korea. In the case of rural areas, the youth age group was insufficient, and the aging population was more serious, so the dependence on foreign manpower was inevitably higher. In rural areas through the influx of foreign workers, spaces reflecting their culture are emerging. The purpose of this study is to provide implications for resolving issues of overseas migrants by analysing recent Korean and foreign research trends and characteristics of overseas migrants in rural areas, with a focus on placeness.Methods: To address the aim this study utilised bibliometric analysis employing visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer program for overseas research collected from Scopus document search and Netminer program for South Korea research drawn from Korean Citation Index (KCI) database.Results: This study determined that first, since the 2000s, there has been an increase in related overseas research. However, there were only 382 studies covering all of ‘place,’ ‘immigrant,’ and ‘rural,’ and the number was even lower in South Korea. Second, in research on overseas immigrants in rural areas based on place, community and health were identified as major issues. Third, the difference in research issues between overseas and South Korea was analysed by the degree of community and the approach to health issues. As a result, this study concluded that social inclusion should be addressed first through community and health issues.Conclusion: Through research characteristics related to ‘place’, ‘immigrant’ and ‘rural’ at home and abroad, the placeness of overseas immigrants in rural areas has brought up issues of community and health. However, more importantly, concluding remark is that social consensus on social inclusion should be prioritised to contextualise these issues.