Research

Book cover image of Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest

Book Announcement! Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest

Based on long-term ethnographic research with labor and social movement activists, Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest is at once a chronicle of the life-and-death character of protesting precarity in South Korea and a searing examination of repertoires of solidarity for upending injustice.… more

[CFP] Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be co-editing Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea, a volume in the “Detours” series of alternative guide books. It’s a public-facing project that centers interdisciplinary, creative, and demilitarist feminist approaches, with aims to defamiliarize the ways in which Korea is popularly depicted by and consumed through a global tourist gaze.… more

Interview on South Korean feminism

Back in September 2021, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jorlen Garcia, a student journalist at Claremont McKenna College. We talked about wide-ranging topics such as K-pop (of course), spy cams, and overall climates of patriarchy and gender inequality in South Korea. She did an amazing job editing the interview, which is published online at Asia Experts Forum.… more

Oct 23 in LA: Protesting Seoul: Resistance in Precarious Times

I’m giving a talk in LA on Wednesday, October 23 about protest cultures in Korea and the Korean diaspora, co-presented with Jennifer Chun on research we’ve been doing for a while. We plan to do a little more than a typical academic talk with multiple projectors and audiovisual materials. An event organized by GYOPO. Please do RSVP.

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Weekly Kyunghyang cover story asks, “Is it impossible to co-exist with street vendors?”

A matter of law enforcement or livelihood struggles of the urban poor? Winter is high season for street vending and urban crackdown as can be seen in the recent violence against street vendors in Gangnam district of Seoul. With hundreds of city-hired security contractors (a.k.a. “thugs”) recorded on video overturning carts and destroying vendor property, it’s also high time to consider the urgent questions of informal economy, urban poverty, and state violence. Are legalization and taxation the obvious solution? It’s not such a simple matter, the article argues. For one, there is an enormous range among street vendors, from corporate to livelihood-based, income levels, and vending forms…… more