Dissertation Project

Institutions of Uncertainty: Inequality, Public Categories, and Social Change in Contemporary Korea

My dissertation explores how experiences of uncertainty become organized into durable public categories and institutional responses. It asks how forms of insecurity that are initially diffuse and personal come to be recognized as shared social conditions, and how those conditions are translated into policies, programs, and political claims. The project focuses on the intersection of social inequality, state discourse, and civic interpretation in contemporary Korea.

Substantively, the dissertation traces how recurring concerns such as housing precarity, educational competition, employment instability, and demographic anxiety are framed and circulated across public institutions. I examine how these issues become legible through expert language, government initiatives, media narratives, and local organizational practice. By following these translations, the project shows how institutional categories do not merely describe social reality but actively shape the terms through which people understand themselves and others.

Methodologically, I combine qualitative interviews, archival research, close reading of policy discourse, and historical analysis of public debate. This mixed approach allows me to connect everyday narratives of uncertainty to larger shifts in governance, social classification, and political imagination.

Current Projects

In addition to the dissertation, I am developing several article-length projects on institutions, public discourse, and inequality.

• Classifying Uncertainty: How Social Problems Become Public Categories Examines how diffuse experiences of precarity are translated into recognizable categories for policy intervention and public debate.
• Local Institutions and Urban Inequality in Contemporary Korea Studies how neighborhood-level organizations mediate broader structural inequalities and shape everyday experiences of belonging.
• Public Language, Moral Claims, and the Politics of Social Change Explores how civic actors and institutions use moral vocabularies to define deservingness, crisis, and responsibility.

Together, these projects investigate how large structural transformations are interpreted at the level of everyday life and how those interpretations matter for institutional design, political conflict, and democratic imagination.

Research Approach

I am drawn to research that moves between lived experience and institutional form. My work often begins with ordinary language people use to describe stress, aspiration, obligation, and fairness, and then follows how those experiences are stabilized through organizations, media discourse, and policy frameworks. This orientation reflects a broader interest in how sociology can illuminate the connection between personal narratives and historically specific structures.

In practice, this means working across multiple kinds of materials rather than relying on a single method alone. I use interviews to understand interpretation and experience, archival sources to trace institutional development, and close reading of public texts to analyze how categories circulate across social fields. I see these methods as complementary tools for studying how social worlds become intelligible and governable.

Selected Writing in Progress

• Institutions of Uncertainty. Dissertation manuscript in progress.
• "How Social Problems Become Categories." Article manuscript in preparation.
• "Urban Belonging and Local Institutional Life in Korea." Article manuscript in development.