Youngrim
Kim

Youngrim Kim studies the role of digital platforms and data-driven systems in relation to state institutions and governance. She examines how state institutions build and utilize digital technologies to manage complex governance challenges, especially in cases of imminent public health or environmental crises. How do these media and information systems shape the ways we make sense of, and react to, global catastrophic events? Bringing together scholarships in digital studies, critical data studies, and science and technology studies, Kim conducts interdisciplinary research that investigates how crisis response technologies developed for public interest reconfigure state-society relations in moments of risk, uncertainty, and disturbance.

Her current book project, tentatively titled, “Databasing Latent Bodies: Disease Surveillance, Data Publics, and Coded Injustice in South Korea,” critically examines South Korea’s data-driven governance of public health crisis through the cases of two infectious disease outbreaks – 2015 MERS epidemic and COVID-19. Drawing from 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, South Korea, her project illustrates how these crisis response technologies should be considered as contested sites of nation-building where different ideas about citizenship, belonging, and national futures are negotiated.