Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (2025)

Ju Jui Judy Han

Abstract:

Based on long-term ethnographic research with labor and social movement activists, Against Abandonment (Stanford University Press) is at once a chronicle of the life-and-death character of protesting precarity in South Korea and a searing examination of repertoires of solidarity for upending injustice.

Protest forms such as long-term encampments, life-threatening hunger strikes, and perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as catalysts for change. Co-authors Jennifer J. Chun (sociologist and Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA) and Ju Hui Judy Han (geographer and Associate Professor of Gender Studies at UCLA) situate South Korean protest in transnational context to demonstrate how the struggles of South Korean workers are inextricably tied to the globalized conditions of neoliberal capitalism.

Building on the work of abolitionist feminist thinkers, the book theorizes protest as a political form with far-reaching resonance across history and geography, and underscores the significance of collective survival, self-determination, and emancipatory transformation.

Publication Year: 2025

Links:

https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/against-abandonment