Postdoctoral Affiliate
Jaeyoung Kim is a social and visual anthropologist who explores urban complexities, declining industries, community sentiments in Korea and East Asia, and spatial and sensory worlds. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Medicine at Ajou University (2023 - 2024), where she provided anthropological perspectives on medical studies and psychiatric projects.
She was awarded her DPhil in Anthropology from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) at the University of Oxford, with a thesis entitled An Ethnography of a Sewing Neighbourhood Under Threat in Contemporary Seoul, supervised by Professor Roger Goodman. Her doctoral research examined daily dynamics, struggles, dilemmas, frictions, contradictions, and negotiations in a sewing community in the heart of Seoul. Through her deep ethnography based on 18-month fieldwork, she strove to unveil social, industrial, and political entanglements within the neighbourhood, revealing how the declining sewing sector has survived to date, why the sewing industry came to face socioeconomic threats, and why urban regeneration ended up unsatisfactory for residents. During her DPhil and MPhil research, she employed various visual methods, such as photography, mapping, filming, and drawing, so as to grasp and deliver more vivid descriptions of the field and ultimately offer interdisciplinary and experimental representation in anthropology.
Research interests
Jaeyoung’s research interests include everyday life and behind-the-scenes in urban spaces; urban regeneration; infrastructure and politics in urban planning; verbal and non-verbal local surveillance; governmentality; material culture; atmospheres and spatiotemporality; visual and sensory anthropology; phenomenology and embodiment; agency, subjectivity, and social navigation; the sociality of sharing and gift exchange; commensality; blurred boundaries between work and life; anthropology of art; art and medicine; dying industries; value chains in garment manufacturing sectors; sewing communities; anthropology of memory; ethics; qualitative studies; digital ethnography; and cross-disciplinary research methods.
Education
DPhil in Anthropology, University of Oxford (2023)
MPhil (Distinction) in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, University of Oxford (2019)
MA in Arts Management, Chung-Ang University (2016)
BA (top-ranked admission) in Korean Painting and Clothing & Textiles, Chung-Ang University (2012)
Open Access Publications
Kim, J. (2024) The fading light of urban regeneration in a sewing neighbourhood in Seoul, Cities, 150, Article 105013.
Kim, J. (accepted) Understanding sensory anthropology, Cross-Cultural Studies.
