The Detours Symposium Series Featuring Detours-Korea

Sponsors: Mellon Multivocal Humanities Funds for Ethnic Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program, Asian American Research Center, Asian Pacific American Student Development, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Race and Gender, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Victoria Indigenous Governance Program

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea defamiliarizes the ways in which Korea is popularly depicted by and consumed through a global tourist gaze. Through a collection of stories, essays, photographs, artwork, and imaginative maps, Detours Korea examines and challenges how systemic violence–spanning from Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, to natural resource extraction, accelerated development, and migrant labor–profoundly impacts everyday life in and beyond the divided Korean Peninsula and Jeju Island.

Speaker: Crystal Mun-hye Baik, (she/her) is a feminist oral historian, writer, and memory worker who resides in the unceded land of the Tongva and Cahuilla peoples, and Chair and Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Currently, Professor Baik is the co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies Book Series at University of Michigan Press and was recently selected as a Mellon New Directions Fellow (25-28). Her second book, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy, is forthcoming with Duke University Press (April 2026).

Speaker: Andy Choi, is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Slow Hot (London: Schism Press, 2021). His writing has been featured by the Korea Policy Institute, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the South Dakota Review, among others.

Speaker: Ga Young Chung, is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, and is affiliated with the Cultural Studies, the Human Rights Studies, and East Asian Studies at UC Davis. In her research, Chung explores the im/mobility and precarity of humans and non-humans, particularly with respect to racial capitalism and uneven globalization. She is completing her book manuscript, entitled Unexpired: Undocumented Youth Time and Futurity, exploring how undocumented Korean immigrant youth engage with competing possible futures through education, military service, and activism.

Speaker: Ju Hui Judy Han, (she/they) is a cultural geographer and Associate Professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Queer Throughlines: Spaces of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora (2025) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (2025) with Jennifer Jihye Chun. Han is a co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea.

Speaker: Jinah Kim, is Professor in Communication and Media at the University of California, Merced. Her publications include Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019) and Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies, a special issue of the journal of Critical Ethnic Studies. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and on the editorial board of Verge: Studies in Global Asia, American Quarterly, and the Modern Language Association.

Speaker: Eunjin Lee, is a PhD student in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her research explores how state-led population management, within the broader contexts of Korean domestic and global economies, (re)produces categories such as gender, race, and disability in the contemporary era. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Center for Sexual rigHts And Reproductive justicE (SHARE), South Korea. One of her co-authored books, IMO: Representation of US Camptown Women in Pyeongtaek (2018, in Korean), documents the oral histories of three former sex workers in U.S. camptowns in South Korea.

Admission Information:
If you require accommodation for a disability in order to fully participate in this event, please contact the event organizer with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Contact Info:
Vernadette Gonzalez
510-664-4485
vernadette@berkeley.edu

Access Coordinator:
Vernadette Gonzalez, vernadette@berkeley.edu, (510) 664-4485

Registration Instructions
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