EASC (OSU) and the Asian Studies Program (Spelman College) present:

Protests and Numbers in South Korea: Height, Duration, Scale, and Date

Ju Hui Judy HAN
Assistant Professor
Gender Studies, Center for Korean Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

April 12, 2022
1:00 - 2:30pm (online)
Registration required: Registration Link
April 12 Flyer

Abstract: Dramatic acts of resistance and solidarity are a mainstay in South Korea’s political landscape, especially for protesting workers and unionists, students, religious leaders, and human rights activists. While many social movement scholars have examined the instrumental and structural factors that promote strategic forms of collective action, Ju Hui Judy Han is interested in paying close attention to the expressive, embodied, and spatial dimensions of these political protests. Her talk discusses the variety of ways in which protest engages emotionally with numbers—precarious occupations of high-altitude structures, perilously long-term tent encampments, spectacular mass rallies, and commemorations of significant dates that become a recurring part of the protest repertoire. These numbers are not just about demonstrating size and political strength, she argues, but also a way of fostering radical interdependency and shaping how we relate to protest spaces as part of our everyday social lives.

Biography: Ju Hui Judy Han (PhD in Geography, UC Berkeley) is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her recent writings about (im)mobilities, religion, protest, and queer feminist politics appear in journals such as Scholar & Feminist Online, Journal of Korean Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Geoforum, and Journal of Asian Studies and in several edited books such as Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval (2022), Digital Lives in the Global City (2020), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and Territories of Poverty (2015). She is working on a book manuscript on “queer throughlines” and co-writing another on protest cultures.

Contact: Professor Tinaz Pavri, Founding Director, Asian Studies Program, tpavri@spelman.edu

This event  is coordinated by the Asian Studies Program and made possible in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.