Dr Woori Han

Woori Han (she/her) is a lecturer in Media and Communications at the Department of Communications, Drama, and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research centers on media and cultural activisms, popular culture, and the body at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Aspiring Subjects: Queer Media Activism in Neoliberal South Korea, focuses on contemporary, transnational Korean queer feminist activisms to examine how digital media and cultural production have become a critical site where contested global and local sexual politics and networked affects can construct social movements, backlashes, and new subjectivities. She is also working on two additional projects: (1) the examination of the transcultural reception of Korean popular culture through an intersectional feminist lens of a Korean reality TV show, and (2) an inquiry into the relationship between digitally mediated bodies and the rise of conservative gender, sexual, and race politics. Her research on the cultural translation of transnational feminist movements, feminist media critiques, and queer cultural activism has been published in Communication, Culture & Critique, Media, Culture & Society, and Korea Journal. She was a recipient of top student paper awards from ICA (International Communication Association) and NCA (National Communication Association). She holds a PhD from the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania.