Mun Young Cho is an associate professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research focuses on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Based on fieldwork in Harbin, her first book The Specter of “The People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines how a state dedicated to serving “the people” manages the impoverishment of urban workers, the one-time representatives of the socialist project. Currently, Cho is conducting research on the evolving landscapes of grassroots activism in South Korea as well as on migrant youth in a Shenzhen’s Foxconn town in southern China, along with various modes and actions of mobilizing “the social.”
