Untouchability as Global: On Korea

Date
Tuesday, February 11, 2025, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Audience
Public

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Event Description

Untouchability in the 21st century, also called caste discrimination or “discrimination based on work and descent,” affects at least 250 million people living across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with diaspora communities reaching into Europe and the Americas. This paper explores the historical making of this little-known transnational world of untouchable groups, focusing on the experiences of Korea’s Paekchŏng during the Chosŏn and early Japanese colonial periods. 

Diana S. Kim is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. She is the author of Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press 2020). Kim’s research and teaching are animated by concerns with how today’s states and economies have come to define people at their edges, constructing what it means to be illicit, deviant, or marginal. Her area expertise lies with Southeast and East Asia, with particular interest in their transnational connections and comparative legacies of colonial rule since the late nineteenth century. Kim’s scholarship has received awards and generous support from the American Political Science Association, Association for Asian Studies, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, Institute for Advanced Study, Social Science History Association, and the Silvers Foundation/New York Review of Books. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, B.A. from Korea University and was a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. 

Contact
Sunaina Danziger
Scholarly Series