Juyeon
Park
Using qualitative research methods, I study gendered experiences of transnational families across class lines, particularly between East Asia and Western countries.
My research agenda consists of two broad goals: 1) to understand the intersectional impact of social categories–class, gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship–on social reproduction across national borders; and 2) to explore the construction of (cosmopolitan) selves in that process, which is often intergenerational. I am particularly interested in how East Asian families employ migration as a strategy for family survival and/or class reproduction and how gender, in particular, shapes the roles and identities of individual family members in the process.
My dissertation, Raising Global Elites from a Distance: Transnational Parenting of South Korean Students, provides a qualitative analysis of the transnational parenting of Korean students at elite U.S. colleges and the consequential class reproduction. Drawing on both parents' and children's narratives, it examines 1) gendered views of high-achieving Korean young adults on their mothers' and fathers' involvements in their privileged transnational upbringing; 2) intersectional impacts of gender and class on elite Korean parents' assessments of their own parenthood; and 3) gendered and classed acquisition of "flexible citizenship" among those young Korean elites, at both home and schools abroad.