I am a PhD candidate in Sociology with a specialization in Computational Social Science at the University of California, San Diego. My research sits at the intersection of political sociology, social movements, collective identity, governance, and the sociology of classification and category formation. I use South Korean youth politics as a central case for examining how social categories become politically meaningful, institutionally consequential, and publicly contested.

My dissertation, A Generation in Search of Hope: Youth Movements and Youth Identity in Neoliberal South Korea, asks why "youth" became one of the most influential languages for naming social problems in contemporary South Korea. I examine how activists, civic organizations, policy actors, and state institutions transformed youth from a flexible life-stage label into a public problem category, a political identity, a field of policy intervention, and a contested form of representation.

My path to sociology has moved across peace studies, international relations, journalism, media activism, and public-policy work. Before and during graduate school, I worked with civic organizations and international institutions on youth participation, migration, disability, refugees, and human rights. These experiences shaped the questions that continue to guide my research: How do private difficulties become publicly recognized problems? Who gains the authority to represent a social category? How do movement claims enter institutions, and what happens when those institutions redefine the categories they adopt?

Methodologically, I combine ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, organizational and historical analysis, policy and legal documents, and computational text analysis. Rather than using these methods independently, I use them to follow categories across different domains. Public discourse shows how problems become nameable; interviews and archives reveal how actors interpret and organize them; and policy materials show how those claims enter governance.

I am also the founder and executive director of Media NOON, a nonprofit media organization in Seoul focused on human rights and youth-centered journalism. Through its Media Activism School, I have helped train more than 60 participants in public-interest media and social-change journalism. I have also worked with UNFPA, the International Organization for Migration, and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs on projects involving youth, civil society, migration, and social policy.

I hold a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in International Relations from Kyung Hee University, and an MA in Sociology from UC San Diego.