Translations (🇺🇸→🇰🇷, selected)
My primary research interest is the political sociology of education and development, which I develop in my dissertation and related working papers. My earlier publications also extend into questions of race, ethnicity, and nation.
Across this research, I pursue one theoretical question: 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 interest can, counterintuitively, produce more egalitarian outcomes. In particular, my research has attended to actors in intermediate positions, those who could align with or break from established elite coalitions, and the factors that drive them to shift.
My primary line of empirical inquiry traces the political origins of educational access reform in postwar Korea: my dissertation **examines the formation and collapse of status-defending coalitions between elite schools and elite parents, and the unexpected sequence of events that collapse set off, ultimately resulting in South Korea's remarkably open secondary education system.
A second, earlier line of research focuses on Asian Americans and Koreans, who occupy structurally similar intermediate positions in their respective US and global racial orders. This work examines how group boundaries shape the prospects for cross-group solidarity, including diverging attitudes among Asian American ethnic groups toward race-conscious admissions (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity) and competing discourses of nationalism in Korea in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Sociological Perspectives) and the rise of anti-Asian racism in the US (Sociological Inquiry).
Besides my empirical research, I am also committed to methodological pluralism, specializing in qualitative and historical analysis, with a deep interest in articulating their distinct scientific logics.
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]
🔎 Google Scholar: Profile
🗄️ Orchid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5778-9469
