Contested Territories: Perspectives on Seoul

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Speakers

Ju Hui Judy Han is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her writings about queer feminist politics, religion, and protest appear in journals such as Journal of Asian Studies, positions, and Journal of Korean Studies and in edited books such as Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval (2022), Digital Lives in the Global City (2020), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South (2015). She is currently working on her book on queer activism in South Korea and the diaspora and co-authoring another book about protest repertoires. Han is also a co-editor for Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea, an alternative travel guide in the works.

Se-Mi Oh is Assistant Professor of Modern Korean History in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the architectural and urban practices of Seoul and explores the relationship between space and history writing. She is the author of City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines the relationship between language, text, and media to trace the discursive formation of modernity and colonialism in the urban space of Seoul in the 1920s.

Eunseon Park is director of Listen to the City, an art, urbanism, and research collective consisting of urban researchers, designers, architects, filmmakers, and activists. Started in 2009, Listen to the City began its creative activities by asking questions regarding environmental and social irresponsibility and the destruction of cultural diversity—problems linked to the excessive development of Korea. Listen to the City is not focused on how our activities are displayed or circulated in art galleries, but on posing a set of creative questions and searching for answers about what to do within the social context. The purpose of the collective’s activities is to transform unsustainable cities into sustainable ones, and to question and discover what the territory of the public is, and what common values are in cities. Park received her Ph.D at Yonsei University and is an invited associate professor at Seoul National University of Technology, Digital & Culture Policy department, Graduate School of Public Administration.