Background

Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Lee Da Eun always have been curious about neighbouring countries, which have intertwined the history of the colony and the cold war with Korea. Her curiosity led her to participate in many cultural exchange programs with Asian students.

With a one-year exchange student experience in Taipei, Taiwan, she got a chance to widen her perspective, escaping from the Northeast Asian frame (China-Korea-Japan). In Taiwan, she could observe changing East Asia’s geopolitical dynamics and its impact on youth’s lives in Asia. Also, while interacting with Asian youth, she got interested in the success and spread of Korean pop culture among Asian youths.

She completed her B.A. degree in Sociology and Chinese Studies. She obtained her M.A. degree in Woman’s Studies from Ewha Womans University in Korea in 2020 with a thesis on the “Young Taiwanese Women’s Korean Working Holiday Experience.”

Before joining NUS, Da Eun worked as a Teaching and Research Assistant at Ewha Womans University, Korean Military Academy, and the University of Technology Sydney. She also worked and participated in various research studies regarding migration and gender issues in multiple institutions, including Korea’s Migration Research & Training Centre, Korean Women’s Institute, and Korean Women’s Development Institute.

Da Eun is one of the founders of Feminist Research Web Magazine (FWD) in Korea, and her article was published in the Korean Women’s Studies Review in 2021.

Asian Languages

Da Eun is a native speaker of Korean and fluent in Mandarin Chinese. She has also started to learn Cantonese.

Research Interests

Her research interests lie in migration and mobility, gender, and transnationalism. She has a warm affection for marginalized youth suffering from high unemployment and soaring house price in Asia and tries to reflect on her works.

In her PhD research, she looks at transnational youth migration to Korea, focusing on marginalized non-elite youth in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She tries to read this migration as youth’s escaping of their society not only in the context of youth issues but also from youths’ responses to geopolitical and cultural dynamics in Asia (e.g., Globalization, China’s rising, K-pop media culture in Asia).

She enjoys inter-disciplinary approaches, including sociology, anthropology, and human geography. In methodology, she has interests in ethnography and qualitative research methods.

In NUS, she is working as a graduate member in the Gender & Sexuality Research Cluster at FASS (AY2021-2022). She is a recipient of the NUS Research Scholarship.