Dr. Jaeeun Kim

Biography

Jaeeun Kim is a political sociologist and law and society scholar at the University of Michigan, where she holds a courtesy appointment at the Law School and serves as the Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor in Sociology at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her research interests center on questions of human mobility, inequality, power, and agency, with a focus on developing a relational, processual, and agentic account of categorization and identification. This work has significant implications for understanding inequality at local, national, and global levels. Kim's research takes a transnational perspective, systematically considering sending and transit contexts in the study of international migration through a multisited approach. She authored the monograph "Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea," published by Stanford University Press in 2016. Her dissertation won the 2013 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. Additionally, her book received several accolades, including the 2017 Thomas Znaniecki Book Award from the ASA Section on International Migration and the 2017 Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from the Social Science History Association. Kim's work is supported by various organizations, including the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She has published articles in journals focused on sociological theory, law and society, and migration, and is currently engaged in a book project concerning asylum-seeking unauthorized migrants on religious grounds based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork.

Research Interests