Workshops, Conferences, Lectures, etc.
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Two book talks in Global & International Studies at UC Irvine
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea symposium at UC Berkeley
Monday, February 2, 2026
Book talk (Queer Throughlines) at UC Davis
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Roundtable Discussion on Gen Z Protests in Pacific Rim Cities, 2019 to 2024, at UCLA
Moderated by Michael Berry, Discussion with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, and Ju Hui Judy Han
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Book talk (Against Abandonment, with Jennifer Jihye Chun) at the Center for Korean Studies and the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, UC Berkeley. Hybrid event — register to join on Zoom.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Book talk (Against Abandonment) at Scripps College
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Book talks (Against Abandonment and Queer Throughlines) at USC
Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalysts of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that repeat across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, andabolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.
Queer Throughlines (University of Michigan Press, 2025) draws on years of direct participation, interviews, and ethnography to examine the transpacific spaces of Korean LGBTQ+ activism. This talk focuses on Chapter 1, “Against Homophobia in the Diaspora,” to analyze the contemporaneous emergence of political homophobia and queer visibility in California during the 1990s and 2000s. By examining the 1999 case of a virulently anti-LGBTQ+ petition campaign driven by Korean Christian conservatives, and the subsequent mobilization of an ad hoc coalition of LGBTQ+ activists and allies who sought to counter it, the talk deploys the conceptual framework of “throughlines” — a methodological approach to tracing the connective threads, political affinities, and discursive proximities that shape queer activism across disparate geographies. By recovering this transpacific history, I argue that queer activism and political homophobia emerged not merely in opposition, but in tandem, as both sides utilized the diaspora to refine their rhetorical strategies and mobilize their respective communities.