Hae Yeon Choo

Choo Hae Yeon is an associate professor in the Sociology department at University of Toronto at Mississauga, and the Director for the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto (2022-2025). Her book Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016) and related articles (published in Gender & Society and Qualitative Sociology) offer an account of how inequalities of gender, race, and class affect migrants’ practice of rights through a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea—factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Based on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic research, this research delves into the marginal spaces in which non-citizen migrants negotiate their rights, entitlements, and belonging in South Korea in the absence of shared ethnic nationhood, and develop an understanding of citizenship, not as a simple legal category, defined in top-down fashion for an individual by a nation-state, but rather as an interactive accomplishment involving both the host society and the migrants as active agents constrained by the structures of law and policy. Her current book project examines social activism in contemporary South Korea as sites of emergent critical social theory and new political imagination.