Biography

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the interconnected worlds of work, 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 award-winning 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 symbolic forms 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. Currently, she is leading a collaborative research project with the UCLA Labor Center, Service and Employees Union 2015, United Domestic Workers, and the Pilipino Workers Center on retirement insecurity for California’s aging homecare workforce.

She hold a B.A. in History at Dartmouth College, and an 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.

Courses Taught

LBR STD M119XP – Asian American and Pacific Islander Labor Issues