Position Title
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
Ga Young Chung is a community-based scholar-activist whose works examine the surge of dislocation, precarity, and (im)mobility in the era of uneven globalization. Centering on political activism and resistance of undocumented migrants, she unpacks how the meaning of citizenship is dismantled, rearticulated, and reassembled in the Asia-Pacific. Chung is currently revising her book manuscript entitled “Unexpired: Undocumented Korean Youth Activism, Citizenship, and the Radical Future.” Informed by interdisciplinary insights from Comparative Ethnic Studies, Critical Korean Studies, and Transnational Migration Studies, her work is dedicated to expanding the field of Asian American Studies.
Chung has three on-going projects. She is studying undocumented Korean immigrants’ gendered participation in the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program, focusing on the un-ending Cold War, militarized citizenship, and masculinity. She is also conducting a longitudinal study, which she initially embarked on in 2007 (Chung 2009), of undocumented Mongolian youth and their circular migration among Mongolia, South Korea, and the United States. Lastly, her scholarship is grounded in where she is located – the university. She is investigating the new racialization of Asian student-migrants and its impact on the other marginalized student bodies in neoliberal U.S. higher education.
Chung was listed as the “Teachers Ranked as Excellent” at the University of Illinois in 2017 and 2018 and is a fellow in the Engaged Learning and Teaching Community at the University of California, Davis. Currently, she serves as a member of the Critic’s Choice Book Award Selection Committee at the American Educational Studies Association. She is also an affiliated scholar at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. Chung received her Ph.D. in Education Policy Studies with a graduate minor in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and she obtained her M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University in South Korea.
- Ph.D. in Education Policy Studies with a graduate minor in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- M.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University in South Korea
- B.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University in South Korea.
- critical race theory, transnational migration and globalization, U.S. imperialism, militarism, citizenship, activism and social movement, labor, youth, gender and sexuality, education and pedagogy, comparative ethnic studies, critical Korean studies