Dr. Jaeeun Kim

Biography

Jaeeun Kim is a political sociologist and law and society scholar whose work revolves around human mobility, inequality, power, and agency. Her research focuses on developing relational, processual, and agentic accounts of categorization and identification, particularly in contexts that have significant implications for inequality at local, national, and global levels. She adopts a transnational global perspective that systematically considers sending and transit contexts when studying international migration, utilizing a multi-sited approach. Her work has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Academy of Korean Studies, and her research has been published in journals across sociological theory, law and society, race/ethnicity/migration, and historical sociology. Her monograph, based on her award-winning dissertation, was published at Stanford University Press in 2016 and won several awards, including the Thomas Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Additionally, recent articles of hers, including one in Sociological Theory, have garnered accolades such as the 2019 Theory Prize from the ASA Theory Section. She is currently working on a book project that examines asylum-seeking unauthorized migrants on religious grounds, based on ongoing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she obtained her PhD from UCLA and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Stanford.

Research Interests

Experience