Hyun-Chul Kim

Hyun-Chul's research interests broadly include the historical development of care spaces and their carceral effects in East Asia (welfare institutions, private mental hospitals, leprosy colonies, shelters for abandoned dogs, and so on).

Her doctoral project especially examines the carceral politics of the Hope Village Movement, a 1960s nationwide village-building project for people with leprosy in South Korea. It centers a deeper analysis of “the carceral” in the broader Asian context from the ruins of war, the discontinuity and continuity of the colonial past, the emergence of cosmopolitan citizens, as well as dreams of reconstructing nations via small community and rural reforms.