Relational and Formative Academic Identity in the Korean Journal of Politics of Education

Abstract

In South Korea, politics of education has developed through its academic association and journal over the past three decades. Yet questions concerning its academic identity have remained unresolved. Existing studies have generally approached the identity of the politics of education by seeking a fixed disciplinary domain, or by limiting their analyses to specific research topics. In contrast, this study conceptualizes the identity as a process that is continuously shaped through its relationship with educational administration. From this perspective, BERTopic-based topic modeling was conducted on the abstracts of 1,876 articles published in the Korean Journal of Educational Administration (KJEA) and the Korean Journal of Politics of Education (KJPE) between 2006 and 2026, divided into four periods. The findings indicate that the distinctive topics of KJPE shifted over time―from higher education structural reform to superintendent elections and, more recently, to research on educational politics as a field of inquiry―with no fixed area persisting throughout the period. Meanwhile, topics in the KJPE were more closely associated with terms related to conflict, evaluation, and power than those in the KJEA. These findings suggest that the identity of educational politics is continuously formed and reconstructed through changing historical contexts and its relationship with educational administration. The study further argues that discussions of academic identity should consider the broader social structure of the academic community.