Institute for Korean Studies

Agnes Sohn Jordan is a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Korean Studies at Indiana University. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent research is an ethnography of a contemporary exit of downwardly mobile middle-class millennials from Seoul, the political, cultural and economic center of South Korea, to Jeju Island, a semi-rural farming, fishing and tourism island south of the Korean peninsula. Her research centers on the way politically salient refusals – what some have called engaged ‘exodus’ – are constituted by material, embodied, and affective engagement with space/place. She is interested in how millennials remake their lives in the wake of economic crisis, and their participation in the creative economy. Her research also looks more broadly at the transforming political economy of Jeju Island. She has conducted long-term ethnographic field research on Jeju Island. She is currently transforming her dissertation into a book manuscript.