Translations (🇺🇸→🇰🇷, selected)
I am Ji-won Lee (이지원, 李志遠), a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University at Albany, State University of New York.
As a political and historical sociologist, I work at the intersection of political sociology, sociology of development, and the study of status and inequality, with institutional change as a central focus. My research examines when and why societies expand access for less powerful groups, even when powerful actors pursue exclusive interests.
I am committed to methodological pluralism, specializing in qualitative and historical analysis with a deep interest in articulating their distinct scientific logics.
When and why do societies become more inclusive, even when powerful actors work to preserve their advantages?
My research investigates the conditions under which the pursuit of status and group interest can, counterintuitively, produce more egalitarian outcomes, and the conditions under which it forecloses them instead.
I pursue this question through two connected lines of inquiry. The first traces the political origins of institutional change in Korean development: my dissertation, Dismantling Distinction, reconstructs how fractures within elite coalitions produced South Korea's remarkably open secondary education system between 1945 and 1974.
The second examines how group boundaries shape the prospects for cross-group solidarity in contemporary contexts, including the diverging attitudes of Asian American ethnic groups toward race-conscious admissions (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity) and competing nationalist discourses on anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic (Sociological Perspectives, Sociological Inquiry).
I am currently working on translating the methodological discussion in US sociology (e.g., Qualitative Literacy) into the context of Korean society. Additionally, I am working on reconstructing the hidden and scattered methodological traditions in South Korean qualitative sociology.
I have been involved with several academic community-building efforts, including the Problem-Solving Sociology network, the Association of Korean Sociologists in America (AKSA), and the two organizations under the umbrella of the American Sociological Association (ASA): the Korean Sociologists in America (KSA) Community (KSA) and the Sociology of Development Section. If you have any interest in or questions about any of these initiatives, please let me know.
📧 Email: [email protected] | [email protected]
🔎 Google Scholar: Profile
🗄️ Orchid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5778-9469
