Research

My first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke UP, 2010), empirically examined transnational, transracial adoption from South Korea and pursued theoretical questions connected to kinship and belonging in their contemporary elaborations and entanglements with global capitalism, state power, and transnational processes. As an ethnography, it tracked the evolution of a global network of transnational Korean adoptees who were the first to articulate their personal experiences with a broader history of South Korean modernity, gender oppression, and reproductive politics in relation to U.S. empire and Cold War geopolitics. Foregrounding the experiences of displacement, social networks of shared personhood, and the political agency of adult adoptees, Adopted Territory helped to lay the groundwork for the interdisciplinary field of Critical Adoption Studies. This project was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Commission, and the Korea Foundation. Adopted Territory received the Social Science Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies and the James B. Palais Prize in Korean Studies from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, both in 2012.

My second book, Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ (Duke UP, 2022) approaches the nature/culture problematic via environmental anthropology and political ecology and also contributes to feminist social studies of science and animal/posthuman studies. The Korean DMZ,  uninhabited for more than six decades, has become an unintentional haven for biodiversity, where rare and endangered species flourish between the overdeveloped South and the environmentally ravaged North. Since the late 1990s, the South Korean state and provincial governments have actively embraced the symbolic transformation of the DMZ from a jagged scar representing the trauma of national division into a green belt representing peace and life. This project analyzes alternative infrastructures of humans and nonhumans in de/militarized ecologies to foreground “biological peace,” which requires a political framework that can expand conceptions of peace beyond only human concerns. The research and writing for this project was supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, UC Humanities Research Institute, and UCI’s Center for Critical Korean Studies. Making Peace with Nature was awarded the James B. Palais Prize in Korean Studies from Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies in 2024.