Hyun Ok Park

Ph.D. (UC Berkeley), Assistant Professor (Arts).

Historical Sociology, Postcolony, Comparative Methods and Comparability of East and West, Capitalism and History, Historical Memory, Korean Diaspora, Transnational labor Migration, and Citizenship

Office: Vari Hall, 2153
Office Phone: (416) 736-2100 ext. 22291
hopark@yorku.ca

My work as a sociologist encompasses interdisciplinary engagement with the philosophy of history, the crisis of capitalism, and the epistemological issues associated with comparative studies. My archival and ethnographic research concerns Korean transnational labor migration to and from northeast China, a border area known as Manchuria and the Balkans of Asia, at two historical moments--the first half of the twenty century and the current post-cold war period. I compare political cultures and social practices of community, sovereignty, and rights in the contexts of the nation-state system, the advent of global capitalism, and geopolitics. My research compares different periods not as discrete moments but as interdependent units formed through historical memories and the concept of history. Asia and diaspora as the site of my work leads me to explore the comparability of modernity of places, center and margin, and west and rest. With the working title of "Neoliberal Democracy: Korean Transnational Labor Migration, History, the Post-Cold War Asia," my new book in progress brings the variant nexus of national, human, ethnic, and labor rights into dialogue with the politics of neoliberal democracy and history. It explores the historical change of sovereignty not as axiomatic postmodernity but rather as a product of the politics of history.

Selected Publications:

Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria. Duke University Press, 2005.

Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies (co-edited), Boundary 2 Volume 32: 2 (Summer 2005).

"Repetition, Comparability, and Indeterminable Nation: Korean Migrants in the 1920s and 1990s,” in Harry Harootunian and Hyun Ok Park (eds.), Boundary 2 (2005), Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies.

"Desires for North Korea," in Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross (eds.), Anti-Americanism. New York University Press, 2004.

“Anti-Americanism and Realignment in the Two Koreas,” Radical Philosophy, 2003 May issue.

“Korean Manchuria: The Racial Politics of the Territorial Osmosis,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 99: 1 (Winter 2000), Pp. 193-215.

"Ideals of Liberation," in Elain Kim and Chungmoo Choi (eds.), Dangerous Women: Korean Nationalism and Women. New York: Routledge Press, 1998.