Jaeeun Kim

Jaeeun Kim is Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology and Professor of Law (by Courtesy) at the University of Michigan. She is a political sociologist and law and society scholar, studying race/ethnicity/nationalism and migration/citizenship. Kim is the author of the award-winning book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Stanford University Press 2016). Her article won the 2019 Theory Prize from the American Sociological Association. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016–2017) and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2020–2021), where she holds a permanent fellow position from Fall 2024.

The project

Title: Repertoires of Redemption: Migration, Asylum, and Religion in the Era of Involuntary Immobility

"The project is to complete the manuscript of my new book, preliminarily entitled Repertoires of Redemption: Migration, Asylum, and Religion in the Era of Involuntary Immobility. My book project examines the hitherto underexplored nexus of migration, religion, and nation-states in the current phase of globalization, focusing on asylum-seeking by unauthorized migrants on religious grounds. The project draws on an in-depth ethnographic investigation of the migration trajectories, legalization strategies, and conversion careers of ethnic Korean migrants from China to the U.S., focusing especially on those who apply for refugee status as Christians. By bringing together macro- and micro-level analyses, I investigate how migration governance, transnational religion, and politics of human rights are navigated and negotiated on the ground with their full complexity and contradictions. Thanks to the residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, I have made meaningful progress on the publication front, publishing four single-authored articles out of this project. The article published in Sociological Theory won the 2019 Theory Prize from the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association."

Hosting institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• 2024    “Seeing like a Church, Seeing like a State: The Church-State Relation in Religious Asylum Adjudications.” Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion, May 23, 2024.    
• 2024    “Illiberal Origin, Liberal Future? Pledges of Allegiance for Native-Born and Naturalised Citizens in South Korea.” In Swearing Loyalty: Should New Citizens Pledge Allegiance in a Naturalisation Oath? Edited by Patti Tamara Lenard and Rainer Bauböck. Global Citizenship Observatory Working Paper, 2024/13, pp. 44–47, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Study, European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
• 2022    “Between Sacred Gift and Profane Exchange: Identity Craft and Relational Work in Asylum Claims-Making on Religious Grounds.” Theory and Society 51 (2): 303–33.
• 2019    “‘Ethnic Capital’ and ‘Flexible Citizenship’ in Unfavorable Legal Contexts: Stepwise Migration of the Korean Chinese Within and Beyond Northeast Asia.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45 (6): 939–57. (Special Issue: Strategic Citizenship: Negotiating Membership in the Age of Dual Nationality)
• 2019    “Ethnic Capital, Migration, and Citizenship: A Bourdieusian Perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (3): 357–85.
• 2018    “Migration-Facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration.” Sociological Theory 36 (3): 262–88.