Dissertation Project

A Generation in Search of Hope: Youth Movements and Youth Identity in Neoliberal South Korea (Book-style doctoral dissertation in progress, UC San Diego)

Over the past two decades, cheongnyeon ("youth") has become one of South Korea's most powerful languages for naming social problems. Unemployment, precarious work, housing insecurity, debt, delayed independence, and political exclusion are now routinely discussed as "youth problems." Local governments operate youth centers and participatory institutions, political parties recruit youth representatives, and the 2020 Framework Act on Youth established youth as a formal domain of national policy.

Youth, however, is not an obvious basis for durable political identity. It is temporary, internally divided, and shaped by major inequalities of class, gender, region, education, housing, and family resources. People age into and out of the category, and the problems associated with youth could have been organized through other categories such as labor, class, housing, welfare, or generation. My dissertation asks why youth nevertheless became such a widely usable category for public diagnosis, political claims, and policy intervention.

I argue that youth became politically powerful through overlapping processes of structural change, public problem formation, activist interpretation, organizational development, issue work, and institutionalization. Youth was neither the natural expression of a homogeneous generation nor simply a classification imposed by the state. Activists, organizations, policymakers, and institutions made youth politically usable by defining its subjects, attaching problems to it, building representative infrastructures, and translating claims into policy.

The dissertation develops the concept of youth as a bundling axis. A bundling axis is a social category that does more than classify a population - it organizes relationships among problems. In South Korea, youth became powerful because it connected precarious employment, housing insecurity, debt, family dependence, delayed adulthood, unequal life chances, and political exclusion within a shared field of public meaning and claim-making.

This framework shifts the analysis from category formation to axis formation.

At the same time, the ability to aggregate multiple problems makes a category politically vulnerable. Once youth became institutionalized, political parties, government agencies, civic groups, media organizations, progressive activists, and conservative youth actors increasingly competed to define whose experiences counted, which problems belonged to youth, and who could legitimately speak in its name.

Empirically, the dissertation follows youth across four connected domains:

The project uses an abductive, multi-method research design. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during five consecutive summer research visits to South Korea between 2021 and 2025; 59 formal in-depth interviews in Korean with activists, founders, organizers, policymakers, politicians, and civic actors; organizational archives and movement publications; policy documents, ordinances, legislative materials, and government reports; and computational analysis of more than 1.6 million Korean news articles containing the term cheongnyeon between 1990 and 2024.

Current and Ongoing Work

• "How Youth Became an Aggregating Public Problem Category: Category Formation in South Korean News Discourse, 1990-2024" (Revise and Resubmit, xxxx)

  Examines how youth became a public category capable of gathering multiple social problems under a shared name. Combining computational analysis of more than 1.6 million news articles with historical and qualitative evidence, it shows how post-1997 transformations in employment, housing, education, and adulthood entry made youth increasingly available as an aggregating public problem category. Rather than treating youth as a homogeneous generation, the article argues that youth became a historically specific public form through which classed insecurity at the threshold of adulthood could be named, moralized, and debated.

• "Making 'Youth' Political: Youth Identity Work and Political Category Formation in South Korea" (Under review)

  Explains how activists transformed youth from a descriptive age category into a collective identity and political subject. Develops the concept of youth identity work to describe the moral reframing, collective definition, organizational infrastructure building, and institutional translation through which activists made claims in the name of youth. Shows that the emergence of youth politics cannot be explained by shared age or hardship alone; organizations had to construct youth as a meaningful political "we," define which experiences it represented, and build institutions capable of speaking in its name.

• "Whose Youth Housing? Building a Public Problem and Defending Its Meaning in South Korea" (In preparation / near submission)

  Examines how Minsnail Union made housing into a recognizable youth problem through sustained organizational work, tracing how activists documented tenant experiences, constructed measurements, operated counseling programs, translated individual cases into structural diagnoses, and developed policy interventions. Introduces issue work as the process through which movements attach a concrete problem to a collective category, and examines boundary defense: how activists attempted to preserve a tenant-centered understanding of youth housing as the category expanded to include homeownership, investment, and highly leveraged young buyers. Conference versions of this project have been presented under the title "Layered Youth: How a South Korean Housing Movement Made 'Youth' Politically Usable."

• "Constructing Youth as Political Subjects: Competing Conceptions of Youth, Agency, and Politics Across Scholarly Traditions" (Dataset constructed; preliminary findings available upon request)

  Compares how different scholarly traditions conceptualize youth agency, participation, generation, transition, and political subjecthood, and examines how academic fields define what counts as youth politics and which forms of action become visible or invisible under those definitions.

• "Youth Participation in the Far Right: A Review" (with Beatrice Waterhouse; in revision for journal submission; equal contribution)

  Examines why young people participate in far-right movements, parties, and political cultures, bringing together research on economic insecurity, status threat, gender politics, digital media, political socialization, and collective identity, while identifying limitations in explanations that treat youth merely as an age cohort.

Earlier Research and Related Work

Before my current dissertation project on youth politics and collective identity, my research focused on migration, disability, and human rights in South Korea. These projects examined how structural inequality becomes visible in public discourse and policy, and they continue to shape my broader sociological interest in category formation, social exclusion, and political recognition. This earlier work includes research on second-generation migrant children and youth in South Korea, disability and digital media activism, and refugee policy implementation.

In this line of work, I analyzed the life chances and integration experiences of second-generation migrant children and youth in South Korea, as well as the experiences of YouTubers with disabilities in Korea as an emerging form of media participation and representation. I also contributed to policy-oriented research on refugee governance and implementation, including work with the IOM Migration Research and Training Centre on South Korea's refugee policy after the 2013 Refugee Act and related legal frameworks for refugee status determination.

Selected Earlier Publications and Policy Reports

• Cho, Eunchong. 2025. "Constraints and Life Chances of Second-Generation Migrant Children and Youth in South Korea." In Migrant Children and Youth: Wellbeing and Integration around the World, edited by L. E. Bass. Emerald Publishing.
• Cho, Eunchong, and Yun Hyung. 2020. "The Experience of YouTubers with Disabilities in South Korea." In Reinterpretation of Disabilities (in Korean).
• Min, Jeewon, and Eunchong Cho. 2017. "South Korea's Refugee Policy and Implementation Since the 2013 Refugee Act: Trial and Error." IOM Migration Research and Training Centre. (Equal contribution with first author.)
• Min, Jeewon. 2018. International Legal Systems and Case Studies on 'Gender Guidelines' for the Determination of Refugee Status (IOM MRTC Research Report Series No. 2017-03). IOM Migration Research and Training Centre. (Research Assistant: Eunchong Cho.)