Hyejeong Jo

Hyejeong Jo is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Her research interests are in social inequality, social mobility, education, family, and qualitative methods. Her dissertation, Diverging Paths: Three Essays on the Transitions of Working-class Young People in South Korea, is a qualitative study of diverging transitional experiences of working-class young people in South Korea. The results of the dissertation draw on a one-year of ethnography in a South Korean high school as well as the broader community which serves young individuals from working-class homes. In the dissertation, she interrogates the various costs of the college-for-all society by examining various struggles of working-class young people in their transition to college and work in a society where college education is glorified. During her fellowship, she is studying the social identities of educational elites using in-depth interviews with college students who are studying at elite institutions in South Korea.

Contact information:
hyejeong@sas.upenn.edu