Yoonjung Kang is a cultural anthropologist with research and teaching interests in the areas of health, care, medicine, childbirth, and reproduction hinging on gender, class, and ethnic/racial dynamics in South Korea and contemporaneous Korean diaspora communities. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled A Plurality of Care: Women, Childbirth, and Health in Contemporary South Korea, examines the medico-social politics of South Korean women’s postpartum care practices which have been dramatically re-framed in a burgeoning postpartum care market over the past two decades.

Dr. Kang completed her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her M.A. and B.A. from Yonsei University in South Korea. Prior to her appointment at the Hebrew University, she served as a Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Contact information: Yoonjung.kang@mail.huji.ac.il

 

Guest Course: Health, Care, and the Body in Korea

This course will explore how and what different meanings and practices of health, care, and the body have been believed, performed, and transformed in Korea, beginning around the turn of the 20th century to contemporary times. Through the examination of ethnographic and historical pieces that document how Koreans differently imagine and manage their bodies, health, and caring practices, we will discuss how health, care, and the body can be shaped by a complex interplay of science, medicine, law, tradition, social system, and/or moral values in Korean culture. Major topics covered in this course include magic and healing, religions, folk remedies and ethnomedicine, biomedical hegemony and Korean medicine, childbirth and reproductive governance, mental health, aging, beauty care, plastic surgery, alternative medicine and therapeutic culture.