Juyeon
Park
Following my dissertation defense in 2020, I plan to revise and publish the material as a book, with which I aim to contribute to multiple fields: family research, gender studies, migration scholarship, East Asian/Korean studies, and sociology of education.
While studying elite Korean transnational families, some questions kept nagging at me: in this ever more globalized and competitive world, who can move freely between occupations or places of residence? How do class, gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship affect their aspirations and life trajectories?
Extending my interests in women's transnational labor and mothering, I am designing two post-dissertation research projects: first, I will conduct a project about "education migrant" couples, such as international graduate students in the U.S. (F-1 visa holders) and their spouses–mostly wives with F-2 visa–who often experience disruptions in their own career or education while they "support" their spouses' transnational higher education.
Second, focusing on the South Korean context, I will write about how immigrant women (mostly from Southeast Asia and increasingly African countries) utilize their class- and ethnicity-specific transnational mobility in order to be "good" mothers in the Korean Society where "educational fever" is often considered as a norm.