About

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, where I study social movements, youth politics, neoliberalism, and political sociology, with a regional focus on South Korea and East Asia. My dissertation, A Generation in Search of Hope: Youth Movements and Youth Identity in Neoliberal South Korea, examines how cheongnyeon ("youth") shifted from a flexible life-stage label into a durable political and policy category after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, culminating in the 2020 Framework Act on Youth. More broadly, my research asks how collective identities become politically usable, how they are stabilized through institutions, and how they reshape democratic conflict and governance.

My work sits at the intersection of political sociology, social movements, youth studies, and Korean Studies. I am especially interested in questions of category formation, collective identity, inequality, and institutional change. Methodologically, I use mixed methods, combining ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, historical and organizational analysis, and computational text analysis of Korean media and public discourse. This approach allows me to connect lived experiences and movement strategy to longer-term transformations in public categories, policy, and political representation.

Before and during graduate school, I also developed a public-facing professional background in journalism, media activism, and international organizations. I founded Media NOON, a nonprofit media organization in Seoul focused on human rights and youth-centered journalism, and I have worked with UNFPA, IOM, and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs on youth, civil society, and policy-related projects. These experiences continue to shape how I think about research: not only as scholarly inquiry, but also as a way to engage public institutions, policy debates, and civic life.

I hold a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from UC Berkeley, an MA in International Relations (Peace and Global Governance) from Kyung Hee University, and an MA in Sociology from UC San Diego. Across these stages of training, I have remained committed to understanding how social inequalities become politically legible - and how collective actors, especially young people, organize to change the terms of public life.