Elisa Kim

General Information

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a former fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. My primary stream of research attempts to further our understandings of racialization, prejudice, and stereotypes—using attitudes towards immigrants living in South Korea as a theoretically informative case. My ongoing dissertation (under the tutelage of Professors Gi-Wook Shin, Matt Snipp, and Dan McFarland) explores the dynamic nature of racialization in response to immigration. My other research interests include the meaning of “race” and “ethnicity”, the experience of double consciousness, and computational methods. Prior to the PhD, I received my BA in Asian American Studies from Pomona College and MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University. In my master’s thesis, I analyzed the relational landscape of North Korean human rights organizations by applying social network analysis to archival data of events they co-organized.

Dissertation

While it is widely accepted that a sudden inflow of foreigners leads to prejudice among natives, how this in-migration shapes the cultural meaning of racial categories is less well-understood. In this dissertation, I use computational linguistics tools to quantitatively analyze the relationship between changing immigration patterns and the meanings natives associate with linguistic labels of various migrant groups.