Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest

Sponsor(s): Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Center for Korean Studies, Department of Geography, Department of Sociology, Center for Ethnographic Research, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program

Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalysts of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that repeat across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, and abolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chun’s research and teaching focus on labor and community organizing; gender, care, and migration; ethnography and intersectional feminist methods; and culture, power, and global capitalism. She is the author of the award-winning book Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States ( 2009) and of Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest, co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han (2025). She is currently Chair of the Department of Labor Studies and holds a faculty appointment in the International Institute at UCLA. She received her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley, where she was a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues.

Ju Hui Judy Han is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Han is the author of Queer Throughlines: Spaces of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora (2025) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (2025) with Jennifer Jihye Chun. She is currently working on a decolonial travel guide to Korea and a new project on the “feminist take” on contemporary cultural politics. She received her PhD in Geography at UC Berkeley, where she was a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues.

Speaker: Jennifer Jihye Chun, Professor, Asian American Studies and International Institute, UC Los Angeles

Speaker: Ju Hui Judy Han (she/they), Associate Professor, Gender Studies, UC Los Angeles

Admission Information:

Wednesday, February 18 at 5 PM-6:30 PM (PT)

Hybrid: 
IEAS Conference Room, 2111 Bancroft Way (5th floor), Berkeley, CA 94720
Register Today! (Free)

Please join us at 4:30 for a reception with book sales and signing.

Contact Info:
issi@berkeley.edu

510-642-0813

Access Coordinator:
Maxwell Vanderwarker, maxwellvan@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0813