Jungmo Youn is a historian of media and culture whose research examines the formative process of capitalistic rationality in East Asia, with particular attention to the cultural formation of the middle class in Korea, China, and Japan. Situated at the intersection of cultural history, media studies, and historical materialism, his work investigates how popular narratives, media technologies, and cultural industries are mediated in response to shifting global regimes of capital accumulation. More broadly, he explores how immediate forms of experience and mentality are represented and materialized as thoughtimages and epistemic structure that shape contemporary social formations and cultural imaginaries. He received his PhD in communications from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.<\/p>\n
At KWI, Jungmo is preparing a second book project, Neither Julien Sorel Nor Billy Elliot<\/em>, based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the academic experiences of Chinese university students, following their trajectories from undergraduate studies in China to the completion of MA degrees in the UK and Hong Kong. Drawing on 5-year participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted while working as a lecturer at two universities in China and the UK, this project traces the transformative dynamics of anxiety and desire that emerge from the cultural antinomies between internalized political censorship and the pursuit of higher education as a pathway to individual and intergenerational class mobility.<\/p>\n This research contributes to an interdisciplinary understanding of the reshaping cultural matrix of East Asian capitalistic socialization within global cultural production. It illuminates the cultural interface where local modes of conversions of monetary capital into social\/symbolic capital are articulated with the global higher education system, increasingly operating as a cultural industry sector serving as axes for the global mobility and reproduction of unproductive labor power. Focusing on the second generation of China\u2019s post-Deng economic reform, this study also offers comparative insights into homologies with Korean contexts in the 1990s. Furthermore, it opens a space for theoretical conversation between the ethnographic approach of early British cultural studies, often selectively appropriated and mechanically applied in a positivist manner, and the Frankfurt School\u2019s concepts such as cultural industry, quantification of quality, and the formalization of reason, which have frequently been decontextualized from their German philosophical lineage and accepted as \u201dhalfknowledge (Halbwissen)\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":154,"featured_media":20663,"template":"","person_category":[437,277],"class_list":["post-20662","person","type-person","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","person_category-fellows","person_category-forschende"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/20662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/person"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"person_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person_category?post=20662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}