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Jennifer Chun

Associate Professor

Areas of Interest: Class and Gender, Development and Globalization, Labor and Employment

Phone: (310) 794-7780

Email: jjchun@asianam.ucla.edu

Office:

3319 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095

Biography

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies and Chair of International Development Studies (IDS) in the International Institute at UCLA. She is Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), where she leads the Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group, a joint initiative between the IRLE and the Center for the Study of Women (CSW)|Streisand Center.

Her research and teaching focuses on the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, migration, and social movements under global capitalism. Trained as a sociologist with a commitment to interdisciplinarity and ethnography, she has produced a body of scholarship that examines how workers employed on the bottom rungs of the labor market have sought to make sense of and collectively transform the unequal power dynamics that have shaped their everyday lives. Her first book, Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009), highlights the significance of the symbolic as a distinct form of worker power for women and immigrants who labor in low-paid, precarious jobs under neoliberal employment regimes. Her second book Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han and forthcoming from Stanford University Press), follows the turn to heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in the protest repertoires of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs. She has also written numerous articles, book chapters, and other publications about gender, migration, and care work; immigrant workers and community-based organizing; and informal and precarious labor politics. She is the co-editor of Gendering Struggles against Informal and Precarious Work (in Political Power and Social Theory), Care Work in Transition (in Critical Sociology), and Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea (in the Journal of Korean Studies).

She received her B.A. in History at Dartmouth College, and her M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously on the faculty in the Department of Sociology at The University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. While at the University of Toronto, she served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs

Education

PhD University of California, Berkeley
MA University of California, Berkeley
BA Dartmouth College

Research Interests

Gender, labor and precarious work; comparative labor movements; race, class and gender; culture, politics and social movements; development and globalization

Publications

  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye and Ju Hui Judy Han. 2025. Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 
  • Kim, AJ and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2024. “Building caring cities: From disaster relief to community-based infrastructure for unauthorized and low-paid immigrant workers,” Journal of Urban Affairs 1-20  
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye, Cynthia Cranford, Yang-Sook Kim and Jennifer Nazareno. 2023. “Confronting Servitude: Asian Immigrant Women Workers in State-Funded Homecare,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 49(1): 115-140 
  • Cranford, Cynthia and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2023. “Multi-level analyses of homecare labor,” pp. 385-403. In Research Handbook on Applied Intersectionality, edited by Mary Romero. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye. 2022. “Protesting Precarity: South Korean Workers and the Labor of Refusal.” Journal of Asian Studies 81(1): 107-118 
  • Yi, Sohoon and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2020. “Building Worker Power for Day Laborers in South Korea’s Construction Industry.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 61(2-3): 122-140 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye and Yang-Sook Kim. 2019. “Feminist Entanglements with the Neoliberal Welfare State: NGOs and Domestic Worker Organizing in South Korea,” pp. 147-68. In Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 35) Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited. 
  • Agarwala, Rina and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2019. “Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work,” pp. 1-28. In Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 35) Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited. 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye and Cynthia Cranford. 2018. “Becoming Homecare Workers: Chinese Immigrant Women and the Changing Worlds of Work, Care and Unionism.” Critical Sociology 44:7/8: 1013-1027  
  • Gottfried, Heidi and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2018. “Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Care and Migration.” Critical Sociology 44:7/8: 997-1112  
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye. 2016. “Building Political Agency and Movement Leadership: The Grassroots Organizing Model of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.” Citizenship Studies 20(3-4): 379-395 
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  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye. 2016. “The Affective Politics of the Precariat: Reconsidering Alternative Histories of Organizing Women, Immigrants, and Racialized Workers.” Global Labour Journal 7(2): 136-147 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye. 2016. “Organizing across Racial Divides: Union Challenges to Precarious Work in Vancouver’s Health Care Sector.” Progress in Development Studies 16(2): 173-188 
  • Paz Ramirez, Adriana and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2016. “Struggling against History: Migrant Farm Worker Organizing in British Columbia,” pp. 87-104. In Unfree Labour? Struggles of migrant and immigrant workers in Canada, eds. Aziz Choudry and Adrian Smith. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye and Rina Agarwala. 2016. “Global Labour Politics in Informal and Precarious Jobs,” pp. 634-650. In Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment, eds. Steve Edgell, Heidi Gottfried and Edward Granter. London: SAGE publications ltd. 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye and Ju Hui Judy Han. 2015. “Language Travels and Global Aspirations of Korean Youth.” Positions: Journal of East Asia Critique 23(2): 565-593  
  • Han, Ju Hui Judy and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2014. “Introduction: Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea.” Journal of Korean Studies 19(2): 245-55 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye, George Lipsitz and Young Shin. 2013.“Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(4): 917-40 (with 
  • Chun, Jennifer Jihye, George Lipsitz, and Young Shin. 2013. “Immigrant Women Workers at the Center of Social Change: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates,” pp. 207-231. In Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age, eds. Anna Romina Guevarra, Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, Grace Chang, and Maura Toro-Morn. Chicago: University of Illinois Press

Jennifer Chun

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