My academic foci are on urban landscape, gentrification, and foodie culture, especially within the context of Seoul, South Korea.

In my prior researches, I explored the changes of specific places under neoliberalism through a lens of landscape as a product of social practices and, simultaneously, as a producer of social relations. My first academic research addressed shaping and re-shaping of the mining town of Sungjoo in the Midwest of the Korea Peninsula. This study uncovered how places/spaces are socially designed and produced according to power and hegemony. Along the same vein, my master’s thesis examined the squatter settlement of Guryong Village in Gangnam district, Seoul, South Korea. I highlighted the social processes that have constructed and destructed the place for squatters, with a goal of showing how the squatters were excluded and marginalized within the profit-oriented city.