I am a human geographer with expertise on urban and digital studies, contemporary Korea, and East Asia. I examine shifting forms of displacement at the intersection of class, gender, land, and technology. My projects are informed by critical urban theories, political economy, and feminist thoughts.

More information about Yoonai Han

• Urbanisation and East Asian modernity
• South Korean political economy
• Mobility and urban-rural divide
• Intergenerational inequality
• Technology, labour, and class stratification
• Entrepreneurialism and innovation
• Social movement and subculture in East Asia

Research

How does dispossession occur in today’s cities? I address the question through the lens of mobility, labour, and technology, at the growing intersection of the digital and material world in Korea and East Asia. In my current and recent projects, I use ethnography, mapping, archive, and emerging methods in digital humanities.

Moving in Stuckness: Ethnography on digital workers in Seoul

This book project examines the relationship of atomised work, fragmented temporality, and political agency in Korea, through ethnographic observations on short-term digital workers in Seoul. I address how the make-do contingency, conventionally seen as symptoms of crisis or precarity, has become a mode of living in Korea. I situate the routinised contingency against the postwar ideologies of linear progress and upward mobility that have driven Korean modernisation and economic growth. Findings led to the development of projects on: 

• Automation and its hinterland
• Algorithming care: platform and care labour in South Korea
• Cryptocurrency and diverging time-space in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan
• Methods to study moving beings in the time of digital-urban

I am committed in knowledge co-production and decolonisation. I am keen on developing mixed methods and collaboration networks across scholarship, art, and activism. 

Previously, I worked on Seoul Museum of History funded research projects where I combined historical, audiovisual, ethnographic archives and maps to document living culture in Seoul that led to an exhibition in 2022-2023. 

I have taken part in social movements and discussions on eviction, gentrification, and urban commons in Seoul. Through this time, my interests expanded from territorial struggle to stay put to uprooted life.

Supervision

I supervise projects on the following topics with regional focus on Korea and East Asia: political economy, digital and material culture, urban-rural divide, class and gender, inequality, and everyday politics 

Grants and awards

• NWO Aspasia Travel Grant (2024)
• Korean Association of Space and Environment Research Workshop Grant (2023)
• London School of Economics and Political Science Scholarship (2018-2023)
• London School of Economics and Political Science Postgrad Travel Fund (2018-2022)
• Kwanjeong Foundation Scholarship (2018-2023)
• University of Michigan Nam Center for Korean Studies Travel Grant    (2022)

Curriculum vitae

Ph.D. in Human Geography and Urban Studies     (2018-2023, London School of Economics and Political Science)
Thesis: Moving in stuckness: ethnography on short-term workers in Seoul
M.A. in Geography (2013-2015, Seoul National University)
Thesis: Sharing economy and financialisation of surplus space: a case of Airbnb in Seoul
B.A. in Geography (2009-2013, Seoul National University)

Selected publications

Han, Y. (2023). Moving in stuckness: ethnography on the time-space of short-term workers in Seoul (Doctoral dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science).

Lee, S. Y., & Han, Y. (2020). When art meets monsters: Mapping art activism and anti-gentrification movements in Seoul. City, Culture and Society, 21, 100292.

Republished: Lee, S. Y., & Han, Y. (2022). When art meets monsters: Mapping art activism and anti-gentrification movements in Seoul. In: Lees, L., Slater, T., & Wyly, E. (Eds.). The Planetary Gentrification Reader (pp. 390-400). Routledge.

Han, Y., & Lee, S. Y. (2020). Cracking territorial commons— Gongyuji movement in Seoul, South Korea. In Exner, A., Kumnig, S., & Hochleithner, S. (Eds.). (2020). Capitalism and the Commons: Just Commons in the Era of Multiple Crises (pp. 117-132). Routledge.

Han, Y. (2017). Commoning by street vending. In: Gimm, d. (Eds.), For Public Space. 2017. Paju: Dongnyok [in Korean].

Han, Y. (2016). Enclosure on urban commons and Takeout Drawing’s insurgent commoning. Space & Environment, 57: 42-76 [in Korean].