Eleana Kim

Cite as:

Woodruff, Maggie. 2018. “Eleana Kim.” In UCI Anthro Faculty, edited by James Adams and Maggie Woodruff.  In UCI Anthro STS, edited by James Adams and Maggie Woodruff. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, edited by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/eleana-kim/essay.

Essay Metanarrative

Eleana Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research and writing are concerned with theories of the nation, personhood, kinship, and human/non-human relations with a specialty in Korea. She is especially interested in cases that challenge the categories of "nature" and "culture" in environmental and transnational domains.

This PECE essay helps to answer the STS Across Borders analytic question: “What people, projects, and products exemplify how this STS formation has developed over time?”

This essay is part of a broader exhibit on UCI Anthro STS.

STS Across Borders In Brief

STS Across Borders is a special exhibit organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to showcase how the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed in different times, places...Read more

Who is Eleana Kim?

Interview with Eleana Kim, June 2018

“I don’t think of myself as an STS person,” says Eleana Kim, but she acknowledges this may come from a sociological urge to not be defined. And STS, along with its neighboring veins of inquiry, have found their way into her life. While completing her dissertation work at NYU, a thread of medical anthropology research was growing at the university, with academics such as Faye Ginsburg (Kim’s advisor), Rayna Rapp, and Emily Martin. Both of Kim’s projects, on transnational adoption and on the ecologies of demilitarized zones (DMZ), are “oriented around questions of natures/cultures … [which] leads to useful parallel conversations in STS.” Kim taught an intriguing seminar on “Natures” at the University of Rochester, and she says she moved to UC Irvine at the same time that anthropology’s questions were moving.

At this point, Kim remarks, many STS ideas and works are part of the canon, or at least highly recommended: post-foundationalist epistemology, ANT-inspired theory, Haraway’s early writings, and feminist STS; “I think what’s happened is … everyone needs to know something about it now … for example actor-network theory and feminist STS stuff, that has definitely become much more of a lingua franca among more anthropologists than not” (Kim). Theorizing about the future of STS, Kim is “curious about the potential ways post-colonial STS might open up different ways of thinking about knowledge production in different areas of the world."



Kim, Eleana. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 15, 2018.

 

Engagements

Notable Work

Toward an Anthropology of Landmines: Rogue Infrastructure and Military Waste in the Korean DMZ

This 2016 article by Eleana Kim was published by Cultural Anthropology and is available on their websiteRead more

The Flight of Cranes: Militarized Nature at the North Korea–South Korea border

This 2014 article by Eleana Kim was published by RCC Perspectives and is available on the Environment and Society Portal

Abstract: ...Read more

Teaching

What books do you recommend, Eleana?

Asked what books she'd recommend, Eleana Kim had this to say:

  • People haven’t read Keeping Slugwoman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts by Greg Saris enough. It could be read as part of the ontological turn.

  • Alien

  • ...Read more