Eunchong Cho

PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. My research examines how cheongnyeon ("youth") in South Korea shifted from a flexible life-stage label into a durable political and policy category after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, culminating in the 2020 Framework Act on Youth. Rather than treating youth politics primarily as a question of mobilization, I focus on category formation and reproduction: how a heterogeneous, time-bounded identity becomes stable enough to organize governance, budgets, and political conflict.

Empirically, I trace the pathway through which movement claims were translated into institutional categories. I follow the emergence of youth activism in the late 2000s and the organizational development of groups such as Youth Community Union and Minsnail Union, and I analyze how policy experiments and collaborations, especially in Seoul during the 2010s, helped scale "youth" into participatory infrastructure and legal frameworks.

Methodologically, I use mixed methods, combining multisite ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews (2021-2025), longitudinal organizational and policy materials (2010-2025), and computational analysis of Korean news and public discourse (1990-2025).