About

Jennifer Jihye Chun is a Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at UCLA and serves as Chair of International Development Studies in the International Institute. She is also the Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), where she leads the Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group, a joint initiative with the Center for the Study of Women (CSW)|Streisand Center. Her research and teaching focus on the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, migration, and social movements under global capitalism. Trained as a sociologist with a commitment to interdisciplinarity and ethnography, she has produced scholarship examining how workers in low-paid, precarious jobs seek to understand and transform the unequal power dynamics shaping their lives. Her first book, Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States, highlights the significance of symbolic worker power for women and immigrants. Her second book, Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest, explores protest repertoires involving drama, ritual, and suffering among minoritized workers, especially women in precarious employment. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters on gender, migration, care work, immigrant community organizing, and informal labor politics. Chun holds a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley. She has previously taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, where she served as Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Computer Science
• Demographic economics
• Political economy
• Law
• Economics

Selected publications

• <i>Against Abandonment</i> : Rejoinder to reviewers ChunJennifer JihyeHanJu Hui Judy, Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest, Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA, 2025; 332 pp., $32.00 (paper): ISBN: 9781503642256.

  Critical Sociology · 2025-10-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Building caring cities: From disaster relief to community-based infrastructure for unauthorized and low-paid immigrant workers

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2024-06-04 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper asks "who cares" in the precarious city when the state fails. In Los Angeles, one of the largest immigrant-based economies in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerability of low-paid immigrant workers who were unable to do paid work during government-mandated shutdown periods. Unauthorized workers and immigrants in mixed-status households, who are the focus of our study, faced additional challenges, contending with hunger, eviction, and lack of access to essential medicine and public health care due to their exclusion from federal relief assistance. The role of civil society organizations in addressing the gaps and fissures of the neoliberal state is heavily criticized, we argue that scholars—as well as policymakers—need to pay closer attention to exactly how organizational actors are rebuilding state-society relations guided by principles of relational care, strategic responsiveness, and infrastructural efficacy, rather than neglect, incompetence, and criminality. As we face a future of ongoing epidemiological and ecological crises, our public institutions have much to learn from immigrant workers and social justice organizations that are working in concert to build caring cities in precarious and carceral times.

  PublisherDOI

• Confronting Servitude: Asian Immigrant Women Workers in State-Funded Homecare

  Signs · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article utilizes a multilevel intersectional framework to analyze how Asian immigrant women workers in state-funded care provisioning make sense of and contest the relations of servitude that have long plagued low-paid domestic work. Our research, which draws on in-depth interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Filipina/o/x women in California’s In-Home Supportive Services program, shows that workers across all three groups face coercive labor conditions in private homes that severely constrain their ability to refuse excessive demands on their time and tasks, including when care is publicly funded and means tested, provided by paid relatives, managed by the state, and regulated under union collective-bargaining agreements. Yet, our comparative analysis also shows that workers from different groups have varying understandings of what constitutes servitude and how it can be challenged, especially when care receiver–employers are similarly marginalized and are part of workers’ families and ethnic communities. Meso-level institutions such as labor markets, immigrant networks, community organizations, and labor unions play a significant role in mediating workers’ subjective understandings and group-level responses to ongoing conditions of de facto servitude.

  PublisherDOI

• Multi-level analyses of homecare labor

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-03-17

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter develops a multi-level, intersectional framework for analyzing homecare that places dilemmas of servitude experienced by workers within the social organization of homecare, which is shaped by the state’s central role in the care political economy. It highlights three related dynamics of how the state arranges care: to consider the social locations of workers, receivers, or both; to recognize individual, organizational, or multiple actors in the employment relationship; and to support workers’ collective voice. The value of the framework is illustrated through analysis of three cases of homecare in urban centers of California and Ontario (Canada). Findings reveal how a state’s limited regulation of employment conditions - combined with conflicting axes of oppression of workers and receivers - continually risks the slippage of homecare into servitude, even when receivers are also marginalized. Yet where there are mechanisms for workers’ collective voice, there is potential to challenge domestic servitude.

  PublisherDOI

• Protesting Precarity: South Korean Workers and the Labor of Refusal

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2022 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Political economy

  Abstract This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

  PublisherDOI

• La interseccionalidad como estrategia de movilización social

  Travail genre et sociétés · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  La historia de AIWA (Asian Immigrant Women Advocates), defensoras de las inmigrantes asiaticas, durante casi tres decadas en Oakland y San Jose, California, supone un ejemplo paradigmatico de la interseccionalidad puesta en practica por un movimiento social y su eficacia para volver visible la dimension borrosa y diferencial de las formas interconectadas de opresion. El articulo repasa los origenes del concepto de interseccionalidad tanto en los circulos academicos como en la larga historia de las luchas sociales en los Estados Unidos. Basandose en investigaciones etnograficas y documentos de archivos, se muestra como esta organizacion comunitaria ha sabido posicionar a la interseccionalidad en el centro de la labor cotidiana de movilizacion: como una lente para comprender, en la experiencia de las trabajadoras inmigrantes, la interconexion existente entre el genero, la familia, el trabajo y la nacion; como herramienta reflexiva para combinar la teoria y la practica de los movimientos sociales; como estructura que favorece un «liderazgo de pares» y nuevas formas de movilizacion mas inclusivas.

  Publisher

• L’intersectionnalité comme stratégie de mobilisation sociale

  Travail genre et sociétés · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  L’histoire des Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (aiwa ou Defenseures des immigrees asiatiques) a Oakland et a San Jose en Californie, sur pres de trois decennies, offre un exemple eloquent de l’intersectionnalite mise en œuvre dans un mouvement social et de son utilite pour reveler la dimension diffuse et differentielle des formes imbriquees d’oppression. L’article revient sur les origines du concept d’intersectionnalite, a la fois dans les milieux universitaires et dans la longue histoire des luttes sociales aux Etats-Unis. S’appuyant sur des travaux ethnographiques et des documents d’archives, il montre comment cette organisation communautaire a place l’intersectionnalite au cœur du travail quotidien de mobilisation : comme grille d’analyse pour comprendre l’imbrication du genre, de la famille, du travail et de la nation dans l’experience des travailleuses immigrees ; comme outil reflexif pour combiner theorie et pratique des mouvements sociaux ; et enfin comme structure favorisant un « leadership par les pairs » et de nouvelles formes de mobilisation plus inclusives.

  Publisher

• L’intersectionnalité comme stratégie de mobilisation sociale

  Travail genre et sociétés · 2020-10-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  L’histoire des Asian Immigrant Women Advocates ( aiwa ou Défenseures des immigrées asiatiques) à Oakland et à San Jose en Californie, sur près de trois décennies, offre un exemple éloquent de l’intersectionnalité mise en œuvre dans un mouvement social et de son utilité pour révéler la dimension diffuse et différentielle des formes imbriquées d’oppression. L’article revient sur les origines du concept d’intersectionnalité, à la fois dans les milieux universitaires et dans la longue histoire des luttes sociales aux États-Unis. S’appuyant sur des travaux ethnographiques et des documents d’archives, il montre comment cette organisation communautaire a placé l’intersectionnalité au cœur du travail quotidien de mobilisation : comme grille d’analyse pour comprendre l’imbrication du genre, de la famille, du travail et de la nation dans l’expérience des travailleuses immigrées ; comme outil réflexif pour combiner théorie et pratique des mouvements sociaux ; et enfin comme structure favorisant un « leadership par les pairs » et de nouvelles formes de mobilisation plus inclusives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Building worker power for day laborers in South Korea’s construction industry

  International Journal of Comparative Sociology · 2019-12-04 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article examines how unions build worker power for day laborers in South Korea’s construction industry in the context of widespread informality. Drawing upon regional case studies of the Korean Construction Workers Union (KCWU), we find that construction day laborers experience poor working conditions and rampant employment violations under multiple layers of subcontracting that enable capital to bypass existing labor laws and regulations. Despite the regulatory challenges of complex subcontracting systems, unions can still exert direct pressure on firms to improve informal working conditions by securing and enforcing creative collective agreements. Key to this process is the development of regionally-specific forms of worker power that target firms located higher up the subcontracting chain to take responsibility for informal working conditions. Although the scope of influence varies depending on the type of worker power that unions cultivate (e.g. structural, associational, and symbolic), each form of worker power has enabled unions in different regional contexts to establish uniform standards regarding job quality and job security despite formal restrictions on the legal authority of unions as bargaining agents for informal workers. While such approaches require a high level of organizational and strategic capacity, they demonstrate the ongoing relevance of unions in challenging the global turn to informal work through workplace organizing and collective bargaining.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negotiating Care and the Boundaries of Unionism: Chinese and Korean Immigrant Home Care Workers in California

  XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018) · 2018-07-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Jesook Song

  University of Toronto

  65 shared

• Nicole Constable

  65 shared

• Ito Peng

  Ontario Power Generation

  65 shared

• Nancy Abelmann

  65 shared

• Hyunjoon Park

  65 shared

• Caren Freeman

  65 shared

• John Lie

  65 shared

• Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

  65 shared