I was born and grew up in two traditional villages in Korea, Andong Hahoe and Jeonju Hanok, both places that draw visitors from around the world. Growing up among that steady traffic of people from elsewhere is what first made me curious about culture and difference, at home and beyond it. Throughout my 20s, I worked with North Korean migrants, immigrant-origin youth, immigrant women, and refugees. Since then I have been involved with more than ten immigrant and refugee organizations, as a volunteer, a research consultant, and a board member, and those relationships continue today. I chair the research committee at Migration to Asia Peace, a refugee support organization in Korea where I also serve on the board, and at Mustard Seed Generation. Coming to the United States for my doctorate, I became an immigrant myself, which let me stand in immigrants’ shoes.
I am a social worker, and I am proud to be one. We are agents of social change whose task is to connect structural injustice to individual empowerment. Structural conditions and individual lives are usually studied apart, but they meet in the same person. Pierre Bourdieu‘s habitus names that meeting: the dispositions a social world instills in a person, which in turn shape how they act. The word agent carries the argument. To call ourselves agents of change is to hold that people keep agency, the capacity to act. Agency always works on structures it did not make and can remake them over time, the process Margaret Archer calls morphogenesis, and it is exercised inside conditions no one fully chooses. My task is to document how policies, workforces, and service systems distribute disadvantage, and then to widen the room a person has to act on their own terms. I understand that room, following Amartya Sen, as capability: what someone is actually able to do and to be. Understanding a structure is where the work begins, and it earns its keep only when it enlarges what a person can actually reach.
What I observed working alongside immigrants and refugees is what led me to language access. Many other cultural barriers exist and matter just as much. Language is distinctive because it conditions the others: it shapes which social networks a person belongs to, which information reaches them, and which services are usable at all, and so it forms a structure of access of its own. What draws me to it is that it works two ways. Language builds community and can be a source of pride and belonging, and in a host society organized around a dominant language it becomes a constraint, so the same attachment that holds a community together can limit what its members are able to reach. I study it as a structural determinant of health, asking whether health, mental health, and public services exist in the languages people actually speak, and what follows when they do not (see Ingrid Piller on linguistic diversity and social justice).
I have also been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. Growing up in a village, the computer and the internet let me reach a wider world and see the opportunities in it. I am a digital native who was building HTML websites and teaching myself to google in elementary school after-school programs, and in 2018 I started learning Python, mostly for natural language processing, which I now use in my research. The same interest shows up in my methods, in computational social science, and more recently in the subject itself: what language technologies, natural language processing and large language models, do where they meet immigrant wellbeing. I take AI to be a normal technology, in Narayanan and Kapoor’s sense, useful and fallible, and its consequences follow as much from how it is adopted and who it reaches as from the model itself.
APPOINTMENT
Assistant Professor (2025/09-)
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, School of Social Work
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Social Work (2020/09-2025/08)
New York University, Silver School of Social Work
Adviser: Dr. Doris Chang (Culture and Mental Health Research Lab)
Received Government Scholarship for Overseas Study (Ministry of Education in South Korea)
M.A. in Social Welfare (2018/03-2020/02)
Ewha Womans University
Received Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award
B.A. in Sociology & Social Welfare (2013/03-2018/02)
Ewha Womans University
Graduated 1st in the class
BEYOND RESEARCH
Outside of research, I strive to broaden my cultural horizons through travel, reading, and watching documentaries, and I am a devoted K-drama and K-pop fan. You can find my list of recommended documentaries here. I try to live like I’m always traveling, and travel like a local—curious, attentive, and open. I especially enjoy joining walking tours in new cities and listening to the stories of local guides. Below is a list of cities I’ve visited.
FAVORITE QUOTES
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. – Lilla Watson
Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world. – bell hooks
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. – Audre Lorde
Homeland is the legacy of the selflessness of our ancestors. Its concept extends beyond all geographical borders. It is not limited to those who are born in a specific place, nor does it abide by selfish nationalism. The patriotic feeling should merge with hope and the cry of the dispossessed, who aspire and fight for a better world without hatred. Homeland is the dignity and honor of those who know how to be deserving of it. – Jeronimo Lim Kim