Description

The Centre for the Study of Korea is pleased to present the launch of Professor Jesook Song’s new book Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea. Interweaving personal interviews, archival sources and media analyses, this illuminating ethnography profiles the stories of young, single women in South Korea who confront difficulties in their pursuits to live independently and achieve residential autonomy. Living on Your Own skillfully exposes the clash between women’s burgeoning desire for independence and traditional conservative norms in Korean housing practices and financial institutions.

Professor Jesook Song is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and a faculty affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. Jesook Song received her B.A. in Education Science at the Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology with a minor degree in Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Laura C. Nelson (UCBerkeley associate professor, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Chair, Center for Korean Studies) is an anthropologist interested in the mutual engagements of public policies and society/culture. Her three current Korea-based projects examine breast cancer, older women without children, and the generation of new Koreans born to immigrant brides.

Lisa Yoneyama received her B.A. in German Language Studies and M.A. in International Relations at Sophia University, Tokyo, and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University, California. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she taught Cultural Studies and U.S.-Japan Studies at University of California, San Diego, where she also served as Director of two academic programs, the Program for Japanese Studies and Critical Gender Studies Program.

For more information on the book and to purchase the book, please visit the link below.

Description

The growth of informal and precarious work has led many to conclude that labor organizing and collective worker power face severe obstacles. However, reflecting another instance of Polanyi’s much-cited double movement, even workers who are both informal and precarious have successfully organized and won victories, and are doing so in increasing numbers. The greatest successes in this regard are not found in Canada or the United States, but in the global South. The global distribution of these movements and their varied and uneven outcomes across nations point to the usefulness of comparative research. This talk summarizes two recent comparisons in this vein, one comparing US day laborers with Mexican street vendors, and one comparing subcontracted textile and apparel workers in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa. Results point to how precarious informal worker organizing can win, and how social and institutional context can shape informal worker organizing possibilities, strategies, and outcomes. This talk conclude by discussing evolving plans for a global study examining informal and precarious worker organizing in 8 countries: Canada, China, India, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa, and the U.S.

Chris Tilly is a professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA. He has a Joint Ph.D. in Economics and Urban Studies and Planning from MIT. His research specializes in labor markets, with interests in inequality, urban and regional development, public policy, and organizing strategies directed towards better jobs. His current research projects focus on retail jobs and informal worker organizing in a global comparative context. Tilly has published numerous books on labor markets, including Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market (1996) and Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America (2001). His most recent work includes editing How Global Migration Changes the Workforce Diversity Equation (forthcoming).

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