Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology, Professor of Law (by courtesy)
she/her/hers
About
Jaeeun Kim is a political sociologist and law and society scholar studying race/ethnicity/nationalism, and international migration and citizenship from a comparative-historical and transnational perspective. She is particularly interested in developing a relational, processual, and agentic account of categorization and identification. She draws on comparative historical and ethnographic methods and takes a multi-sited approach to research. Korea, northeast Asia, and the Korean diaspora occupy a central place in her empirical research.
Her first book project, which began as her dissertation research, analyzes what she calls “transborder membership politics” in and around the Korean peninsula during the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data collected in South Korea, Japan, and northeast China, she examines the shifting relationships between the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided. This work eventually resulted in several articles and a book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Stanford University, 2016; paperback 2020). The book won multiple awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Social Science History Association (SSHA), and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS).
Her second book project examines the hitherto underexplored nexus of migration, religion, and nation-states, focusing on asylum-seeking of unauthorized migrants on religious grounds. The project draws on a long-term ethnographic investigation of the migration trajectories, legalization pathways, and conversion careers of ethnic Korean migrants from China to the U.S., focusing especially on those who apply for asylum as Christians. By bringing together macro- and micro-level analyses, she seeks to investigate how migration governance, transnational religion, and the politics of human rights are navigated and negotiated on the ground with their full complexity and contradictions. Her recent articles derived from this project examine the complex politics of religious asylum through the lens of migration brokerage, temporality, and state-church relations and were published in Theory and Society, Migration Studies, and Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion.
Kim is also interested in sociological theorizing. She published articles proposing a Bourdieusian theory of international migration and “ethnic capital” in Sociological Theory and Ethnic and Racial Studies. The former received the 2019 Theory Prize from the ASA Theory Section. She is also one of the contributors of The Oxford Handbook on Sociological Theorizing (forthcoming) and currently serving as an editor of Theory and Social Inquiry (previously, Theory and Society).
Her work has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Academy of Korean Studies. Before joining the University of Michigan, she received her PhD degree from UCLA, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Stanford, and taught at George Mason University for a year. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton during 2016–2017, and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berllin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) during 2020–2021, where she holds a non-resident permanent fellow position from 2024 to 2029.
Below is the list of Kim’s recent articles. For a comprehensive list, please check her CV.
Kim, Jaeeun. forthcoming. “Getting Saved from Illegality and Unbelief? Religious Asylum, Migration Dreams, and Christian Conversion.” Migration Studies 13 (3). (Special Issue: Mobile Temporalities and Political Possibilities)
Kim, Jaeeun. 2024. “Seeing like a Church, Seeing like a State: The Church-State Relation in Religious Asylum Adjudications.” Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion, May 23, 2024.
Kim, Jaeeun. 2024. “Illiberal Origin, Liberal Future? Pledges of Allegiance for Native-Born and Naturalised Citizens in South Korea.” In Swearing Loyalty: Should New Citizens Pledge Allegiance in a Naturalisation Oath? Edited by Patti Tamara Lenard and Rainer Bauböck. Global Citizenship Observatory Working Paper, 2024/13, pp. 44–47, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Study, European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
Kim, Jaeeun. 2022. “Between Sacred Gift and Profane Exchange: Identity Craft and Relational Work in Asylum Claims-Making on Religious Grounds.” Theory and Society 51 (2): 303–33.
