EP #497 - 3.17.2022 - RESTORING MEMORY: The Pandemic in Korea w/Hyunah Keum, Seulgi Lee, Hyeonbin Park, & Joelle Champalet

Today I speak with Hyunah Keum, Seulgi Lee, Hyeonbin Park, & Joelle Champalet about the pandemic in Korea

Joëlle Champalet is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She is interested in the intertwined relationship between technology and territories, everyday practices and smart cities. During her master’s thesis and the pandemic, she focused on the transformation of everyday practices of inhabitants by smart systems in South Korea.

Hyunah Keum is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She is interested in the materiality, socioeconomic, and environmental impacts of various wastes. She wrote her master’s thesis about plastic wastes during COVID-19 in South Korea, to investigate different practices to regulate or promote the use of plastic from the perspective of slow disaster. She wants to expand her research fields into revealing unequal relationships around waste, and its impacts on different beings, not just humans but also non-humans. 

Seulgi Lee studied chemistry in her undergraduate and became a master's course student in STP KAIST starting from last year. She is interested in the dynamics between disaster and victims' identity, especially from a feminist perspective.

Hyeonbin Park is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST. He got his Master's degree in theoretical cosmology, but social and environmental disasters have attracted him, so he moved down to the Earth to pay more attention to human and nonhuman lives in the world. His research interests cover broadly Disaster studies, and Environmental humanities & social sciences. He would like investigate how disaster shapes the world and to develop a way of living together with various humans and nonhumans.