BIO

June Hee Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Asian Studies Program at California State University, Sacramento. Her research and teaching focus on Korean diaspora and transnational migration, borderlands and political ecology, materiality and affect, gendered labor and class formation, and the lived experiences of human suffering and memory. Her area of expertise spans contemporary Korea (North and South), China, and Japan, with particular attention to postcolonial and post–Cold War cultures and political economies across East Asia.

Kwon received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Before joining Sacramento State, she was Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.

Research

My first book, Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke University Press, 2023), is a borderland ethnography of how the “Korean dream” has been reimagined and pursued in Yanbian, the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture, since the early 1990s. Built on more than a decade of multi-sited field research in Seoul and Yanbian, the book examines the remittance-driven material realities of transnational labor migration shaped by the Korean Wind—the popular term for the migration fever among Korean Chinese to South Korea. Using bodies, money, and time as ethnographic lenses, it analyzes how Korean Chinese workers have been constituted as a transnational ethnic working class. I argue that the Korean dream represents not only a collective striving for a better life in the context of China’s rapid market reforms but also a reflection of the shifting political economy at the intersection of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Ultimately, the book captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese migrants suspended between the waxing of the “Chinese dream” and the waning of the “Korean dream”—what I call borderland dreams.

 

As a continuation of my interest in borderlands, diaspora, and transnational political economy, my second book project, Citrus Island:The Politics of Fruit Farming in Jeju Korea, turns to the social history of citrus trees imported from Japan—sent by diasporic Koreans living there—to Jeju Island from the 1960s to the 1980s. Citrus cultivation transformed Jeju’s agrarian economy, dramatically raising farm incomes and reshaping the island’s ecology, even as Jeju itself was remade into a model tourist destination with a distinctive history and culture. Situating Jeju within the postcolonial and Cold War development projects of East Asia, this book explores citrus trees as 1) gifts, 2) commodities, and 3) state projects. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Jeju and Osaka, I revisit the gift–commodity relationship and the governance of nature through the lens of citrus farming. By following the trajectories of citrus trees, I illuminate how Jeju has been both controlled by and has sought to control nature as a means of imagining its future.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Book

2023    Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers. Duke University

• The Winner of the 2024 Franscis H.K. Hsu Book Award of the Scociety of East Asian Anthropolog in the the Association of American Anthropology
• Book Interview: https://newbooksnetwork.com/borderland-dreams

2025    <이주, 경계, 꿈: 조선족 이주자의 떠남과 머뭄, 교차하는 열망에 관하여>, 권준희 지음, 고미연 옮김, 생각의 힘

   Book Review: 

• https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/culture/book/1214573.html
• https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202508212111055

Articles/Chapters

2023  “Just Waiting: Korean Chinese Mobility and Immobility” Edited Volume edited by Deborah Durham and Adeline Masquelier," In the Meantime: Toward an Anthropology of the Possible, Berghahn Books

2021    "Area Studies to Aspire to Know: Recent Korean Studies in the US (알리기 위한 지역학, 알고 싶은 지역학: 미국내 한국학 수업풍경과 연구동향)," Critical Review of History (역사비평 in Korean) 137

2019   “Forbidden Homeland: Divided Belonging on the China-Korea Border,” Critique of Anthropology 39:1

2019   “Rhythms of “Free” Movement: Korean Chinese Migrants Under South Korea’ Visa Regime,”Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45:15

2015   “The Work of Waiting: Love and Money in Korean Chine Transnational Migration,” Cultural Anthropology 30:3 (2016 The Cultural Horizon Prize, Honorable Mention, Society of Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropological Association) 

 

Reviews 

2024.   Review on "Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ," Korean Studies 

2022    Review on “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945” Korean Studies 46

2020     Review on “Between Foreign and Family: Return migration and Identity Construction Among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese,” Journal of Asian Studies 79:2(May)

2016     Review on “Living on Our Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea,” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 22

2014      Review on “Representing the Invisible: The American Perceptions of Colonial Korea (1910-1945)” written by Jimin Kim, Dissertation Review (dissertationreview.org)

2002    “Nationalism of Divided Korea and the Ethnic Identity of Koreans in Japan,” Research of Korea and Japan Ethnic problems3(in Korean): 185-218, Seoul, Korea

 

Courses that I Teach

• Asia in the World
• Modernity and Globalization in Asia
• Asian Migration and Diaspora
• Korean History
• Korean Culture
• Culture and Society of North Korea 
• US-China Relations
• Global East Asia, Global Capitalism
• Human Rights and Humanitarianism in East Asia 
• Money, Sex, and Power
• Wealth and Povery in East Asia
• Political Economy of East Asia

Professional Associations

• Assocation of American Anthropology 
• Association of Asian Studies 
• Association of Asian American Studies