Eunchong Cho

PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego

Political Sociology · Social Movements · Category Formation · Youth Politics · Korea

I am a political sociologist studying how social categories become collective identities, public problems, and institutions. My dissertation, A Generation in Search of Hope: Youth Movements and Youth Identity in Neoliberal South Korea, explains how cheongnyeon ("youth") became a powerful political and policy category in South Korea during the post-1997 period.

Rather than treating youth as a homogeneous generation or simply as a category imposed by the state, I trace the interpretive, organizational, and institutional work that made youth politically usable. I develop the concept of a bundling axis to explain how a social category can connect problems such as precarious work, housing insecurity, debt, delayed independence, and political exclusion, while remaining internally unequal and politically contested.

My research combines five summers of ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea, 59 in-depth interviews with activists, organizers, policymakers, and politicians, organizational and policy archives, and computational analysis of more than 1.6 million Korean news articles published between 1990 and 2024. My current projects examine public problem formation, collective identity, housing activism, youth governance, and ideological contestation over the meaning of youth.