Graduate Student Directory

Summary of Expertise

[This page displays a waist-up photograph of a smiling Korean woman with medium-length brown hair wearing a brown jacket.]

Broadly, I am interested in how economic imaginaries around development and trade have shaped citizen-making in the transpacific world, especially in Asia and Latin America as parts of an organic world system, with foci on gender, race, and ethnicity. 

My dissertation puts Chile and South Korea into a critical conversation about how these nations' modernization projects have been sustained by the creation and peripheralization of differentiated, disciplined populations. In so doing, I focus on the role and impact of memory politics to glorify the economic achievements of these nations -- often referred to as "economic miracles" -- in shaping the malleable boundaries of belonging.  

Research Interests

Global economic imaginaries around development and trade; citizen-making; memory politics; twentieth-century and contemporary culture in Latin America and Asia; neoliberal political economy in Chile and South Korea; critical development studies; transpacific studies; critical race and ethnic studies; migration studies; global feminisms; critical adoption studies; empires and subempires

Biography, Education and Training

Boyeong Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She received her MA in International Studies and BAs in Economics and Hispanic Language and Literature from Seoul National University. She has work and research experiences in the field of international development cooperation.

Honors, Awards and Grants

Social Sciences Dissertation Award, UCSC, 2023

Social Sciences Summer Dissertation-Writing Fellowship, UCSC, 2023

Online Course Development Award, UCSC, 2023

CITL Graduate Pedagogy Fellow, UCSC, 2023 

STARS Scholarship, UCSC Women's Club, 2021

SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program, 2020

Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, 2020

Selected Presentations

“Models, Miracles, and Memories of (Under)Development: Memory Work and Belonging in South Korea and Chile,” The Politics of Care Graduate Student Conference, UC Santa Cruz, May 17-19, 2023.

Teaching Interests

Teaching Interests:   

•     Critical development studies; cultural political economy; critical race and ethnic studies; gendered migration; women-of-color feminisms.

•     Fostering critical thinking that empowers students to discover the systems of power, interpret the world and our lives, and guide them toward transformative action 

•     Building classroom community as a source of knowledge

•     Interdisciplinary research skills

•     Accessibility- and equity-minded pedagogy in the context of UCSC

Teaching Experience

Instructor of Record 

•     LALS1: Intro to Latin American and Latino Studies 

•     LALS159: Critical Approaches to International Development 

Teaching Assistant 

•     LALS100B: Cultural Theory in the Americas 

•     LALS100A: Social Science Analytics 

•     LALS1: Intro to LALS

•     LALS75: Art and Social Change in Latin America

•     LALS5: Human Rights and Social Justice 

•     LALS94X: Mother Earth, Capitalism, and Crises

•     LALS100: Concepts and Theories in LALS 

•     LALS194T: Youth and Citizenship