SDF

LEE Seung-yoon (Sophia) received a doctoral degree in social policy at the University of Oxford, where she conducted research comparing the welfare states and irregular workers of Northeast Asia. Her main areas of focus are Northeast Asian welfare states and labor markets, precarious work, income support policies, institutionalism and comparative research methodology. Major published articles and works include “Institutional Legacy of State Corporatism in De-industrial Labour Markets” (2016), Korea’s Precarious Workers (2017, co-authored; translated title), and Universal Basic Income is Coming (2018). In 2014 and 2018, she received Minister’s Commendations for her research findings. She is currently an associate professor of social welfare at Chung-Ang University and is also the first non-government-official to serve as Vice Chair of the Committee for Youth Policy Coordination, the government’s central control tower for youth policy, which is chaired directly by the Prime Minister.

Through research exploring the issues facing youth today as well as labor and social policies, she aims to give a voice to the experiences of young people and ensure these experiences are given due consideration in the shaping of policies and institutions. Her objective is to take the current focus on young people as subjects of social policies, in itself a fairly recent phenomenon, a step further - through research that helps create a new kind of feedback system, where young people of all different backgrounds can make their own voices heard, and directly influence policy decisions and development. She believes that the time is ripe for broader dialogue on how to build societies guided by a new understanding of distribution, where the few are not silenced, and where diverse voices flourish together.