Kyungja Jung

Kyungja's academic interests are experientially grounded in and inspired by her involvement in women activism in Australia and Korea. Drawing on feminist theory(s) of intersectionality of gender and sexuality her research has been interested in mapping the gendered nature of social processes from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches. Her areas of research include women movements, women policy, North Korean female defectors, sex workers, violence against women, in particular, migrant women's issues.

Kyungja is interested in the least researched, the hard to reach and the most disadvantaged. Underpinning her research has been a desire to challenge the ‘vulnerability’ thesis, to recognise minority groups and women as agents of social change and to question what agency means in different social, political and cultural contexts. She has created new areas of research in niche but critical topics such as North Korean defectors, migrant sex workers, female migrant entrepreneurs and temporary migrants. She is regarded as a pioneer in the development of research on, and one of the experts internationally in, North Korean women. Bringing a gender perspective to North Korean issues has been a key innovation in gender studies and Asian studies.

Kyungja's research has been published in academic journals including Sexualities, Organization, Women's Studies International Forum, Asian & Pacific Migration Journal, Hecate, Asian Survey, Asian Journal of Women's Studies and International Review of Korean Studies. She has also published a co-authored book Sex Trafficking Or Shadow Tourism?: The Lives of Foreign Sex Workers in Australia (2009 with Jang, H, Jung, K, Dalton, B and Wilson, R.) She published a book Practicing Feminism in South Korea: sexual violence and the women's movement (London: Routledge, 2014). She has just completed a book manuscript (authored with Professor Bronwen Dalton, UTS) North Korea's Women-led Grassroots Capitalism (London: Routledge) and is working on a book Temporary Youth Migration and Intersectionality: Migrant Korean Youth in Australia with Palgrave Macmillan.

Kyungja was awarded her PhD by the University of New South Wales for her doctoral thesis which was the first major comparative study of South Korea and Australia examining the emergence and development of civil society including the women's movement over time, particularly during South Korea's transition to democracy.

In 2004, she was awarded an ARC International Fellowship (Chief Investigator, Professor Peter Saunders at the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW) to conduct a research project comparing Australian and South Korean policy making processes as they relate to women issues.

She has been invited locally and internationally to present lectures and speeches on various topics by universities and a wide range of community organisations such as Sydney Feminist Historian Group (2009), workshop on Women and Human Rights UTS (2008), International Organisation for Migration (2006). She has also been invited by Stanford University (1991), Ewha Woman's University (2004) and Local Governments in South Korea (2004), NGOs in Korea to present the findings of her research. Her talk on Institutionalisation of the women movement in Korea and Australia at Ewha University was aired on the Korean Radio and was seen as having ignited heated debates on the topic among academics and activists.