B.A. Program Director
Junior Professor

Junior Professor Yewon Lee is a sociologist interested in the areas of urban and labor sociology, social movements, and politics in Korea as well as in Asia.

She received her Ph.D. in 2019 in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining University of Tübingen in 2021, she served as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and Assistant Research Professor of International Affairs and Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies.

Currently, Professor Lee is preparing a monograph that examines a fascinating case in which tenant shopkeepers in South Korea are challenging the formidable power of property-ownership-based citizenship. These tenant shopkeepers are micro-entrepreneurs or petit bourgeoisie who are often dismissively labeled as unrevolutionary and individualistic. Yet, the activism of tenant shopkeepers against eviction from their shops is debunking the idea that the autonomous nature of self-employed tenant shopkeepers’ work shields them from capitalist exploitation. Professor Lee’s ethnographic work on tenant shopkeepers’ activism both reveals the urban inequalities that are driven by rentier capitalism and analyzes the on-the-ground efforts to counter them. 

Her work has been well received, winning many awards, including the American Sociological Association’s 2020 Labor & Labor Movement Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Graduate Student Paper Award.