I am a human geographer with expertise on urban and digital studies, contemporary Korea, and East Asia. I examine shifting forms of displacement at the intersection of class, gender, land, and technology. My projects are informed by critical urban theories, political economy, and feminist thoughts.

More information about Yoonai Han

Fields of interest

• Urbanisation, spatial and social mobility
• Debt, displacement, and rentier urbanism
• Technology, labour, and automation
• Social movement and online activism in East Asia
• Mapping, archive, visualisation

Research

How does dispossession occur in today’s cities? I address the question through the lens of mobility, labour, and technology, at the growing intersection of the digital and material world in Korea and East Asia. In my current and recent projects, I use ethnography, mapping, archive, and emerging methods in digital humanities.

Moving in Stuckness: Ethnography on digital workers in Seoul

This book project examines the relationship of work atomisation, fragmented temporality, and political agency in Korea, through ethnographic observations on short-term digital workers in Seoul. I address contingency as an everyday mode of being in cities, beyond labour conditions. I situate the routinised contingency against the postwar ideologies of linear progress and upward mobility that have driven Korean modernisation and economic growth. 

Findings led to the development of projects on: 

• Automation and its hinterland
• Algorithming care: platform and care labour in South Korea
• Cryptocurrency and diverging time-space in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan
• Methods to study moving beings in the time of digital-urban

I am committed in knowledge co-production and decolonisation. I am keen on developing mixed methods and collaboration networks across scholarship, art, and activism. Previously, I worked in Seoul National University Asia Center, where I built a network of collaborators. We worked on research projects, including Seoul Museum of History funded project that combined historical, audiovisual, and ethnographic archives that led to an exhibition in 2022-2023. I have taken part in urban social movements and discussions on eviction, gentrification, and urban commons in Seoul. Through this time, my interests expanded from territorial struggle to stay put to uprooted life.

Supervision

I supervise projects on the following topics with regional focus on Korea and East Asia: political economy, digital and material culture, urban-rural divide, class and gender, inequality, and everyday politics.

Grants and awards

• NWO Aspasia Travel Grant (2024)
• London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Studentship (2018-2023)
• Korean Association of Space and Environment Research Workshop Grant (2023)
• Kwanjeong Foundation Scholarship (2018-2023)
• University of Michigan Nam Center for Korean Studies Travel Grant (2022)
• London School of Economics and Political Science Postgraduate Travel Fund (2018-2022)

Curriculum vitae

• University lecturer in digital urbanism in East Asia, Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University (2023-present)
• Ph.D. in Human Geography and Urban Studies, LSE (2018-2023)
• Center for Asian Urban Societies, Seoul National University Asia Center (2015-2018)
• M.A. in Geography, Seoul National University (2013-2015)
• B.A. in Geography, Seoul National University (2009-2013)

Selected publications

• Han, Y. (2025). Countdown city: contingency as urban condition, hustle as exit, and everyday crisis in Seoul. City, 1-17.
• Han, Y., & Kim, H. (2025). Uneven temporality, subjectivity, and politics of the near future. Space & Environment, 35 (1): 4-13 [in Korean].
• Lee, S. Y., & Han, Y. (2020). When art meets monsters: Mapping art activism and anti-gentrification movements in Seoul. City, Culture and Society, 21, 100292.
Republished: Lee, S. Y., & Han, Y. (2022). When art meets monsters: Mapping art activism and anti-gentrification movements in Seoul. In: Lees, L., Slater, T., & Wyly, E. (Eds.). The Planetary Gentrification Reader (pp. 390-400). Routledge.
• Han, Y., & Lee, S. Y. (2020). Cracking territorial commons—the Gongyuji movement in Seoul, South Korea. In Exner, A., Kumnig, S., & Hochleithner, S. (Eds.). (2020). Capitalism and the Commons: Just Commons in the Era of Multiple Crises (pp. 117-132). Routledge.