EP #399 - 1.14.2022 - New Research: COVID, Digital Technology, and Plastic Waste in South Korea

Today is a researchers’ roundtable day on #COVIDCalls, and I welcome KAIST graduate students Hyon Soo Jeong and Hyunah Keum to talk about their new research on COVID.

Hyunah Keum is a master's candidate at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She recently finished her master’s thesis titled “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Material Politics of Plastic Waste in South Korea,” where she argues that plastic waste has not just increased in Korea during COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the government both allowed discard of disposable plastics and invisibilized the infrastructure to treat those wastes. She wants to expand her area of research into revealing unequal relationships around waste, and its impacts on different beings, humans and non-humans. 

Hyon Soo Jeong is a master's candidate at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy in KAIST. She is interested in data sharing during COVID-19, and her internship experience at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Seoul Policy Center inspired her to study public-private partnerships driven by Information and Communication Technology. Her Master's thesis is titled “A study of coproduction for information sharing during COVID-19: focusing on the case of citizen-developed map services in South Korea,” and her study focuses on how Korean civil society's action of information sharing driven by open government data influenced COVID-19 policy in South Korea.