Ju Hui Judy Han
Graduate Student
BA 1995 (English and Women's Studies) UC Berkeley
Regional focus: Korea, "The World"
My dissertation is about contemporary Korean/American evangelical missionary movements across several mission destinations including the China-North Korea border and Uganda and Tanzania. By tracking missions that originate in South Korea and take place across multiple geographical locations, I examine the theological and sociological currents that stimulate the selection of mission destinations (e.g. "frontier missions," "10/40 Window," "Islam missions," etc.), the institutional actors that mobilize transnational missionary networks, and the concrete projects and activities that are carried out on the mission fields. I'm interested in how contemporary Korean/American missionary movements subvert and reinforce existing racial, gender, and geopolitical hierarchies and subjectivities associated with the historical legacy of Christian missions, and how the missions produce and reproduce multiply rendered world imaginaries by engaging in both universalistic and culturally specific sets of commitments. My postdoctoral project at the University of British Columbia will add to this research by studying how South Korean missionaries use Korean language instruction and cultural exchange to reach ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
For a 24-hour-comix version of my dissertation, see http://www.otherwise.net/?page_id=279
Selected publications
2010 (forthcoming in January 2010). “Neither Friends nor Foes: Thoughts on Ethnographic Distance” in Geoforum, accepted for publication.
2010 (in press). “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: The Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance,” in Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions, edited by Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
2008. "Missionary." Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 3 (June): 58-83. (PDF online)
2005. "Missionary Destinations and Diasporic Destiny: Spatiality of Korean/American Evangelism and the Cell Church.” Institute for the Study of Social Change. ISSC Fellows Working Papers. Paper ISSC_WP_01.
1998. "Incidents of Travel," in Q & A: Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
1994. Co-authored with J. Kehaulani Kauanui. " 'Asian Pacific Islander': Issues of Representation and Responsibility," The Very Inside: an Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, edited by Sharon Lim-Hing. Toronto: Sister Vision Press.