I’m Sujung Kim, the 2018-2020 Mellon postdoctoral fellow for the Futures Initiative and Humanities Alliance. I’m so excited about joining this wonderful team. I received my Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I specialize in critical pedagogy of higher education and community colleges. Grounded in such pedagogy, cultural studies, critical interculturalism, critical race theories, transnationalism, and globalization and higher education, my research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of class, race, citizenship, power, and subjectivities.

As a first generation college student from a rural province in South Korea, in my research and teaching I am committed to critical pedagogy toward the empowerment of culturally, socially, politically and economically disadvantaged and discriminated students as critical agents and social justice Drawn from critical discourse analysis and a 14-month ethnographic project at a public community college in the Chicago metropolitan area, my dissertation examined the complex mechanisms through which racial identities and class positions of working- and lower middle-class Korean international students are reshaped as transnational adrift cheap laborers.

Before joining the Futures Initiative and Humanities Alliance, I was a lecturer and coordinator for the International Program at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I taught a first-year seminar course and a critical intercultural leadership course designed especially for international students. These courses focus on student-centered learning communities, transformative cosmopolitan campus cultures, the meaning of higher education, identities of international students, and critical international leadership of humanity and love for social justice.

I also engaged in three program evaluation projects related to community colleges. As a graduate research assistant, I served as one of the primarily qualitative researchers collecting and analyzing data for the projects focused on low-income student populations in development and adult education in over thirty community colleges in Illinois.

I am honored to join the Futures Initiative and Humanities Alliance that lead the historic reform of higher education for the public good and the empowerment of doctoral and undergraduate students as critical public intellectuals in these turbulent times.