Social Sciences Division
Ph.D. Candidate
Instructor
Graduate Student Researcher at UCSC Center for Racial Justice
Graduate
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Crown College Faculty Wing
217
By appointment
Merrill/Crown Faculty Services
Boyeong Kim (she/her/ella) is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz with Designated Emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. She received her MA in International Studies and BAs in Economics and Hispanic Language and Literature from Seoul National University. She has work and research experiences in the field of international development cooperation.
[This page displays a waist-up photograph of a smiling Korean woman with medium-length brown hair wearing a brown jacket.]
Broadly, I am interested in how economic imaginaries around development and trade have shaped citizen-making in the transpacific world, especially in Asia and Latin America as parts of an organic world system, with foci on gender, race, and ethnicity.
My current research project puts Chile and South Korea into a critical conversation about how these nations' modernization projects have been sustained by the creation and peripheralization of differentiated, disciplined populations. In so doing, I focus on the role and impact of memory politics to glorify the economic achievements of these nations -- often referred to as "economic miracles" -- in shaping the malleable boundaries of belonging.
In different chapters of this project I explore: 1) how the contemporary commemorative politics to honor women in key export sectors has revived the kinds of productive femininity promoted by the authoritarian regimes of South Korea and Chile while invisibilizing migrant labor; 2) how the irregular international adoption practices in the 1970s served as a biopolitical fix to displace and defer the deeper societal crisis in these nations deriving from the incompatibility of the political technologies to govern social and biopolitical reproduction and production and the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War; 3) how economic exceptionalism particular to South Korea and Chile has increaingly involved the tension between contestation and conformity to the pervasive influence of the dominant economic paradigm and how it has been a powerful racializing mechanism amid growing migrant presence; and 4) what discussing the South Korean and Chilean cases together reveals about the neoliberal claim of the Pacific as a space of economic opportunities and strategic cooperation and its ideological mobilization of futurity.
I am developing a second project that critically examines the economic imaginaries of expansion (into the new market) and escape (from underdevelopment) observed in the interaction between East Asia and Latin America in cultural production, extractive industries, international development projects, and trade.
Global economic imaginaries around development and trade; citizen-making; memory politics; twentieth-century and contemporary culture in Latin America and Asia; neoliberal political economy in Chile and South Korea; epistemological underpinnings of Asia-Latin America interactions; critical development studies; critical globalization studies; transpacific studies; critical race and ethnic studies; migration studies; global feminisms; critical adoption studies; empires and subempires
Teaching Interests:
• Critical development studies; cultural political economy; critical race and ethnic studies; gendered migration; women-of-color feminisms.
• Fostering critical thinking that empowers students to discover the systems of power, interpret the world and our lives, and guide them toward transformative action
• Building classroom community as a source of knowledge
• Interdisciplinary research skills
• Accessibility- and equity-minded pedagogy in the context of UCSC
Teaching Experience
Instructor of Record
• LALS1: Intro to Latin American and Latino Studies
• LALS159: Critical Approaches to International Development
Teaching Assistant
• LALS100B: Cultural Theory in the Americas
• LALS100A: Social Science Analytics
• LALS1: Intro to LALS
• LALS75: Art and Social Change in Latin America
• LALS5: Human Rights and Social Justice
• LALS94X: Mother Earth, Capitalism, and Crises
• LALS100: Concepts and Theories in LALS
• LALS194T: Youth and Citizenship
• LALS15: Truth, Justice, and Statistics
Social Sciences Dissertation Award, UCSC, 2023
Social Sciences Summer Dissertation-Writing Fellowship, UCSC, 2023
Online Course Development Award, UCSC, 2023
CITL Graduate Pedagogy Fellow, UCSC, 2023
STARS Scholarship, UCSC Women's Club, 2021
SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program, 2020
Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, 2020
“Models, Miracles, and Memories of (Under)Development: Memory Work and Belonging in South Korea and Chile,” Latin American Studies Association Annual Congress, Bogotá, June 13, 2024.