Youna Kim joined The American University of Paris as an Associate Professor of Global Communications in 2007 from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she had taught since 2004, after completing her PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (2005, Routledge); Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (2008, Routledge); Diasporic Daughters: Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women (forthcoming, Routledge).

Her work has been reviewed in various academic journals including Media, Culture & Society, Feminist Media Studies, and Political Studies Review. Her articles, ‘The Body, TV Talk and Emotion: Methodological Reflections’ (2006), and 'Female Individualization?: Transnational Mobility and Media Consumption of Asian Women' (2010), have been ranked in The 50 Most-Frequently Read Articles for journals, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, and Media, Culture & Society.

Also, she has been invited to join the International Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cultural Studies and the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Social and Political Thought. She reviews book proposals for publishers Routledge and SAGE and serves as a referee for academic journals in the field of media, communications, cultural and gender studies.

BA in Journalism and Broadcasting at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea (1992); MA in Marketing Communications at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA (1996); PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2003).

I joined The American University of Paris as an Associate Professor of Global Communications in 2007 from the London School of Economics and Political Science where I had taught since 2004, after completing my PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Previously I had worked as a journalist in the USA and taught at Goldsmiths College during the four years of my PhD study before joining the faculty of the LSE and the AUP.

My research interests include media audiences, women, television and everyday life, diaspora, identity, cultural and educational consequences of globalization, ‘de-westernizing’ media and cultural studies.

My PhD research has been published as a book, Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (2005, Routledge). Korea is currently witnessing huge social change with unprecedented divorce rates and the disintegration of the traditional family system. Fusing audience research and ethnography, this research presents a compelling account of women’s changing lives and identities in relation to the impact of the most popular media culture in everyday life - television. Within the historically specific social conditions of Korean modernization it analyzes how Korean women of varying age and class groups cope with the new environment of changing economic structures and social relations. The central arguments presented revolve around the revelatory and self-reflexive nature of TV talk and its function as a form of empowerment. The research argues that television is an important resource for women, stimulating them to research their own lives and identities. It reveals Korean women to be creative, energetic and critical audiences in their responses to evolving modernity and the impact of the West. Based on original empirical research, it explores the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas of Korean women as they try to cope with life beyond traditional grounds. 

My new research focus is, ‘De-westernizing Media and Cultural Studies: Opportunities, Obstacles and Learning from Experience’. It explores the cultural and educational consequences of globalization and the inevitable deconstruction of western hegemony in our field. This requires our imaginative responses about the possibilities and forms of ‘de-westernization’. In responses to de-westernization, I have been pursuing the following projects: 

(1) One is a funded research/book project, Diasporic Daughters: Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women (forthcoming, Routledge), (awarded research funding from the Nuffield Foundation and the GB Sasakawa Foundation). Women are travelling out of Korea, Japan and China for very different reasons than those that sent them into diaspora only twenty years ago. From the mid-1980s onward there has been a rising trend of women leaving their country to experience life overseas either as tourists or students, eventually surpassing the number of men engaging in foreign travel. Why do women move? Starting with this question, my research explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the UK/London and the USA/New York. What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? My research intends to analyze the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenge the (Western) assumptions of cosmopolitanism. 

(2) Another de-westernization project is to extend my PhD research and edit a collective book, Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (2008, Routledge). Media audiences are now lively discussed but our debates, theories and teaching are often based upon cases of a few Western societies. An enlarged way of thinking is called for – challenging existing paradigms and providing comparative perspectives. In this research I explore people’s everyday experience of media in Asian countries currently in confrontation with huge social change and transition. Media culture is creating new connections, new desires and threats, and the identities of people are being reworked at individual, national and global levels. Within historically specific social conditions and contexts of the everyday, I seek to develop a comparative understanding of the place of media consumption and the links and gaps between the experiences of different locations. Consequences will be addressed in relation to questions of identity, generation, class, gender, sexuality, globalization, and de-westernizing media studies.

(3) The third project is a book volume, The Precarious Self: Women and the Media in Asia. Women in Asia have gained higher levels of education and the commensurate expectations have become a driving motor in the women’s aspirations for work, economic power, independence, freedom and self-fulfilment. However, women often experience gendered labour market inequity setting limits on patterns of participation, women’s socio-economic position on the margins of work systems, and thus the illusion of the language of choice that the new capacities of education appear to promise. The enlargement of choice can be particularly illusory for women in contemporary Asia where gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions continue to persist and structure labour market outcomes and lifestyles. Yet signs of female individualization have been proliferating as a defining feature of contemporary modes of identity, albeit untenable and ambivalent, within the discursive regime of self – embodied in regulatory practices in society where individualism is not placed at the heart of its culture. Arguably, the media are central to the signs of emergent cultures of female individualization. At a time of significant changes in women’s lives entering a much larger but precarious world, this book explores such phenomena by critically incorporating the parameters of popular media culture into the overarching paradigm of gender relations, economics and politics of everyday life.

I have been invited to join the International Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cultural Studies and the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Social and Political Thought. I review book proposals for publishers Routledge and SAGE and serve as a referee for academic journals in the field of media, communications, cultural and gender studies.

I have examined a PhD viva for Royal Holloway College, University of London. I have supervised graduate students working in the field of media audiences, women, diaspora, identity, Asian media studies, cultural and educational consequences of globalization, and welcome applications from students around the world who are interested in exploring this field.      

Kim, Youna (2005) ‘Experiencing Globalization: Global TV, Reflexivity and the Lives of Young Korean Women’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 8(4) 445-463.

Kim, Youna (2006) ‘How TV Mediates the Husband-Wife Relationship: A Korean Generation/Class/Emotion Analysis’, Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 6(2) 126-143.

Kim, Youna (2006) ‘The Body, TV Talk and Emotion: Methodological Reflections’, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, Vol. 6(2) 226-244.

This article has been ranked in The 50 Most-Frequently Read Articles for the journal (updated monthly).

Kim, Youna (2007) ‘The Rising East Asian ‘Wave’: Korean Media Go Global’, in Daya Thussu (ed) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow. London and New York: Routledge.

Kim, Youna (2008) ‘The Media and Asian Transformations’, in Youna Kim (ed) Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia. London and New York: Routledge.

Kim, Youna (2010) 'Female Individualization?: Transnational Mobility and Media Consumption of Asian Women', Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 32(1): 1-19.

This article has been ranked in The 50 Most-Frequently Read Articles for the journal (updated monthly).

Kim, Youna (2010) 'Diasporic Nationalism and the Media: Asian Women on the Move', forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. No. (TBA). 

Kim, Youna (2010) 'Globalization of Korean Media: Meanings and Significance', forthcoming in Do Kyun Kim and Min Sun Kim (eds) Hallyu: Korean Pop Culture Waves in Asia and Beyond. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.

Invitations | I have been invited for teaching and public talks by many places including:

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Korean Studies Colloquium (2010 November)

University of California, Irvine, Korean Popular Culture Workshop (2010 June)

University of Heidelberg, Germany, 'Rethinking Trends' (2010 unavailable / schedule conflict)

University of California, San Diego, Popular Culture in Contemporary Life (2009 August)

Senate House, ‘Hallyuwood: Korean Screen Culture Goes Global’ Symposium (2005 May)

University of London, Goldsmiths College, 'Critical Ethnography' Symposium (2003 March)

Teaching | The courses that I have taught in London, Paris, and the USA include:

Global Audiences in Media and Communications

Media Diaspora

Media in Asia

Popular Culture in Contemporary Life

Media Globalization

Theories and Concepts in Media and Communications

Research Methods