Elisa Kim

Elisa Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her primary stream of research furthers our understanding of the relationships between racialization, prejudice, and stereotypes—using attitudes towards immigrants living in South Korea as a theoretically informative case. Her ongoing dissertation (under the tutelage of Professors Gi-Wook Shin, Matt Snipp, and Dan McFarland) explores the dynamic nature of racialization. Specifically, she theorizes how society can come to view a group as more or less of a race as their position in society shifts. Empirically, she leverages automated text analysis to quantify various aspects of racialization, measuring how each changes in the portrayals of immigrant groups in South Korean newspapers over the last 30 years. Her other research interests include the meaning of “race” and “ethnicity”, the experience of double consciousness, and computational methods.

Prior to the Ph.D., Elisa received her B.A. in Asian American Studies from Pomona College and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University. In her master’s thesis, she analyzed the relational landscape of North Korean human rights organizations by applying social network analysis to archival data of events they co-organized.