“I am not an adult”: An interpretation of the volunteering experiences of college students in Korea

This paper explores the volunteering experiences of college students from secondary school to the present using interpretative phenomenology, in order to demonstrate how the neoliberal ethos is intertwined with educational practices, and how these educated citizens try to negotiate or struggle with reality and practice as civic agents. It also addresses the limits of the mainstream discourse on citizenship in Korea and seeks to create a balanced citizenship education discourse for sustainable democracy in neoliberal times. Twenty-four undergraduates' experiences with volunteering highlight the critical citizenship perspective and enable the author to examine how neoliberal subject identity as a self-responsible citizen is formed and, how this identity affects individuals' practices as citizens. In contrast to the general public's belief about undergraduates' political apathy and the practice of résumé padding for employment, the participants' civic identities and practices are categorized into three types. Most of the participants desire social change and social justice, but their practices are not connected to their actions in a civic engagement sense. Korean college students shape their own identities by embracing narratives of personal responsibility and authorship for self-development in a vulnerable and precarious reality, and therefore to position themselves for a voiceless and powerless transition to adulthood. In this positioning, while some groups of college students might have committed to becoming people who "live hard and play hard" for human development, the majority of the participants struggled to negotiate the reality of volunteering in parallel with a neo-liberal ethos via critical reflection.