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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 Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department and the International Institute at UCLA. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Toronto (2012-18) and the University of British Columbia (2006-12). Her research explores the interconnected worlds of gender, race, ethnicity, migration and labor through a comparative and critical ethnographic lens. She is the author of the award-winning book, Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on informal and precarious worker organizing; Asian immigrant women and community organizing; gender, migration, and care work; and global labor movements. Currently, she is writing a book monograph on protest cultures in South Korea with Ju Hui Judy Han.

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 Yang-Sook Kim. 2018. “Feminist Entanglements with the Neoliberal Welfare State: NGOs and Domestic Worker Organizing in South Korea.” Political Power and Social Theory Volume 35
  • 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 (online first, February 12) https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517748499 )
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Cranford, Cynthia and Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2016. “Immigrant Women and Home-based Elder Care Work in Oakland, California’s Chinatown,” pp. 41-66. In Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim, eds. Sonya Michel and Ito Peng. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan
  • Paz Ramirez, Adriana and Chun, Jennifer Jihye. 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 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

Jennifer Chun