EP #157 - 10.27.2020 - Life in Quarantine

Today we will talk about life in quarantine with Areum Jeong, Yeonsil Kang, and Hilde Van den Bulck

Areum Jeong is an Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute (in Chengdu, China) where she teaches English Composition, K-pop, Korean Film, and New Media. Her research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean American film, literature, theater and performance, and her current book project, Beyond the Sewol: Performing Transnational Acts of Activism in South Korea and the Diaspora, explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korea and diasporic communities.

Yeonsil Kang is a currently a visiting assistant professor at Drexel University’s history department. She is interested in understanding the intersections of the environment, science/technology, and disasters especially in East Asia. She is working on a project, Mineral Time, Bodily Time: Asbestos, Slow Disaster, and Toxic Politics in South Korea which explores the history and politics of asbestos, the environmental hazard that shaped environmental health policies in South Korea.

Hilde Van den Bulck (Ph.D.) is Professor of Communication Studies and Head of the Department of Communication at Drexel University (US). She recently completed a project on the privacy and trust implications of the use of third party trackers on platforms of public and commercial media and is currently analyzing the role of PBS as most trusted US institution in a post-trust, post-truth era. In the field of media culture, she studies the role of mediated communication in celebrity culture, with a focus on celebrity activism. Together with Drexel Professor Alexander Jenkins, she is currently analyzing the role of different media in the activism of sports celebrities, comparing the cases of Smith and Carlos 1968 Black Power with Colin Kaepernick’s BLM work.