[Book Talk] Against Abandonment: Repertoire of Solidarity in South Korean Protest

Profs. Jennifer Jihye Chun (UCLA) and Ju Hui Judy Han (UCLA) joined by Prof. Tobias Higbie (UCLA), Prof. Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University), Prof. Hannah Appel (UCLA), and Prof. Zeynep Korkman (UCLA)

Thursday, May 14, 2026
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Bunche Hall, Room 10383

About the Book  

Against Abandonment: Repertoire of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalyst of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that repeat across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, and abolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.   

Moderated by Tobias Higbie, Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UCLA, it will begin with brief comments by Jennifer Jihye Chun (Asian America Studies at UCLA) and Ju Hui Judy Han (Gender Studies at UCLA), which will be followed by an open ended dialogue among panelists, with Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University), Hannah Appel (Anthropology at UCLA), and Zeynep Korkman (Gender Studies at UCLA).  

Discussion

Moderated by Prof. Tobias Higbie, Dept. of History, UCLA 

Hannah Appel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She is the author of The Licit Life of Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) and cp-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective. She is also author of the forthcoming book Debtors Unions: Countervailing Power and Abolitionist Presence in the Age of Finance and co-author of Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (Blackstone Publishing, 2020).    

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (ILR Press, 2009) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University, 2025). She is interim Chair of the Department of Labor Studies and has a faculty teaching appointment in the International Institute. 

Ju Hui Judy Han is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. Han is the author of Queer Throughlines: Space of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2025) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University, 2025). She is currently working on a decolonial travel guide to Korea and a new project on the "feminist take" on contemporary cultural politics.   

Tobias Higbie is Professor of history and Labor Studies and the Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UCLA. He is a labor historian whose research explores the intersection of work, migration, and social movement organizing in the United States. He is the author of Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2003) and Labor's Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 2019).  

Zeynep Korkman is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her research explores the gendered relationships between affect, labor, religion, and transnational feminist politics, with a focus on Turkey and the broader Middle East. She is the author of Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (Duke University Press, 2023). Her ongoing research investigates the affective and laborious contents and discontents of transnational feminist solidarity. 

Jong Bum Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Webster University. His research interests include cultural anthropology, urban studies, globalization, race and ethnicity, ethnographic methods, with a focus on contemporary Korean labor and capitalism and Asians in America. His current research project focus on the dilemma of whiteness in St. Louis, Missouri, in the wake of the Ferguson Uprising and Black youth's aspirations and social mobility in the time of BLM and white nativism.   

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies, Labor and Workplace Studies