I love to explore back alleys in cities and get on a random city bus, going all the way to the last stop and enjoying the shifting scenes. I always try to open my eyes wide to search for good hidden spots in an ordinary landscape. My unofficial goal during a Ph.D. is to visit every public park and library in Vancouver. These passions lead me to an interest in how local spaces change and what kind of histories are entangled with them.
In this regard, my academic interest encompasses urban political economy, development geography, and East Asian urban studies. Specifically, for my Ph.D. thesis, I examine what has brought the recent booms and downturns of cities in the context of (post-) developmental states. The state is believed to have experienced substantial decentralizing and neoliberalizing processes since the 1990s, but how this transformation resonates with urban/local development processes is still unclear. I focus on the historical positioning of the ensemble of corporate networks, state structures, and local articulations through tracing the nexus of the state, corporation, and labor in South Korean industrial-urban areas where two global conglomerates–Hyundai in Ulsan and Samsung in Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek—have their biggest car manufacturing plants, shipyards, and semiconductor lines. I am working with Prof. Jim Glassman in the Department of Geography. He has long studied the transnational connections between US warfare projects and East Asian industrialization.