Friday, December 3, 2021
Speaker
Yewon Andrea Lee was an Assistant Research Professor of International Affairs and 2020-21 Postdoctoral Fellow at The George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS). She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Korean Studies at University of Tübingen.
As a political and labor sociologist and urban ethnographer, Yewon is broadly interested in how speculative real estate interests increasingly dictate the shape and character of urban landscapes and urban lives. Currently, Yewon is preparing a monograph that examines a fascinating case in which tenant shopkeepers in South Korea are challenging the formidable power of property-ownership-based citizenship. The activism of tenant shopkeepers in Korea against eviction from their shops is debunking the idea that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs or petit bourgeoisie are either shielded from capitalist exploitation or destined to be unrevolutionary and individualistic. Yewon’s ethnographic work on tenant shopkeepers’ activism both reveals the urban inequalities that are driven by rentier capitalism and analyzes the on-the-ground efforts to counter them.
Her work has been well received, winning many awards, including the American Sociological Association’s 2020 Labor & Labor Movement Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Graduate Student Paper Award.
Commentators
Marco Garrido is an Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. His work has focused on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. The project has been to connect this relationship with urban structure on the one hand and political dissensus on the other. In the process, Dr. Garrido highlight the role of class in shaping urban space, social life, and politics.
The project has resulted in several articles: on segregation in the form of the interspersion of slums and residential enclaves; on the urban poor’s support for populism; on the relationship between spatial and social boundaries; and on developing an urban sociology focused on cities in the Global South. This work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Qualitative Sociology, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. More recently, Dr. Garrido published a book entitled The Patchwork City.
Dr. Garrido’s new project draws a link between democratic recession and the explosive growth of the middle class in the developing world. Specifically, he locates the Philippine middle class’ support for Rodrigo Duterte in their experience of democracy. His research aims to provide a thick account of this experience and, thereby, clarify the sources of democratic disenchantment in the Philippines and elsewhere.
Yoonkyung Lee is a political sociologist specializing in labour politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and was associate professor in Sociology and Asian and Asian-American Studies at State University of New York-Binghamton (2006-2016) before joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto in 2016. She is also the director of the Center for the Study of Korea (2019-2022).
Yoonkyung Lee is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in Korea (University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming). Her recent publications include “Cold War Undercurrents: The Extreme Right Variants in East Asian Democracies” (Politics and Society, 2021), “Seoul as a Site of Labor Resistance: The Spatial Representation of Inequality and injustice” (European Journal of Korean Studies, 2021), and “Neoliberal Methods of Labor Repression: Privatized Violence and Dispossessive Litigation in Korea” (Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2019).
Youjeong Oh is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in geography from University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Oh is the author of Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (Cornell, 2018). Her research explores urbanism, development and dispossession, social movement, and media, tourism, and place in East Asia. Dr. Oh’s current research is about (over)development, dispossession, and desires in Jeju, South Korea.
