Bohyeong Kim

Bohyeong Kim won the 2018 Cultural Studies and Stuart Hall Foundation Award for Early Career Researchers. Bohyeong received a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2018 and is currently Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University, United States. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the reproduction of capitalist subjects and how consent is organized amid the intensification of inequality. Her dissertation is a conjunctural and ethnographic analysis—with a focus on the question of subjectivity—of the transition of South Korea from a developmental state to a neoliberal, financialized form of capitalism. Financial self-help or what is called ‘wealth-tech’ in South Korea became its focal point and she observed the widespread culture of wealth-tech through a lens of online communities and their derived face-to-face practices. She is currently converting the dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled as Wealth-tech: Networked cultures of moneymaking in South Korea. The manuscript addresses critiques of capitalism, emotional engagements and performance of community as the central practices that shape networked financial subjects.  

Her award-winning article, ‘Think rich, feel hurt: the critique of capitalism and the production of affect in the making of financial subjects in South Korea’, is available to read on the Taylor and Francis website. 

READ BOHYEONG KIM’S ARTICLE HERE.