SeungGyeong (Jade) Ji is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame (2025-2027). She earned her PhD in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Ji is a transnational feminist scholar and educator whose research, writing, and teaching explores the diverse histories of gender, sexuality, and reproduction through intersectional, interdisciplinary, and transnational perspectives. In particular, Ji is passionate about exploring how cross-border movements of technologies, thoughts, and peoples — intensified by colonialism, capitalism, and militarization— has transformed social structures related to gender, race, class, disability, sexuality, religions and other intersecting systems of power.
Her current book project, tentatively titled, “Nothing Ever Forgotten: Abortion Politics in Neocolonial South Korea (1979-2019)” (under contract with University of Illinois Press) explores how MVA (Manual Vacuum Aspiration) abortion technologies arrived in South Korea in 1969 as items of international population/family planning aid, have been shaping chaotic abortion politics in South Korea over the past seventy years. Inspired by groundbreaking work from sociologists Bae Eun-Kyung (현대 한국의 인간 재생산, 2012) and Jo Eun-Joo (가족과 통치: 인구는 어떻게 정치의 문제가 되었나』, 2018)—which meticulously analyzed the history of population control/family planning in South Korea, Nothing Ever Forgotten pinpoints how MVA abortion was mobilized and managed within this history: where abortion technologies came from, how procedures were incorporated in the quota policy, who funded them, and how women felt about it both at the time and in hindsight. Drawing on insights from Jin-kyung Lee (Service Economies, 2010), Laura Briggs (Reproducing Empire, 2002), Michel Foucault (Security, Territory, Population, 1978), and many other amazing thinkers, this book sheds light on abortion politics in South Korea both from the perspectives of the controllers, as well as the voices and silences of the governed, women who had abortions.
Ji’s dissertation received the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press’ First Book Prize in 2021, an annual competition honoring the best single-author first book manuscript or dissertation in women’s and gender studies. It highlights cutting-edge, intersectional feminist scholarship that bridges multiple academic disciplines. https://www.nwsa.org/awards-scholarships/book-awards
SeungGyeong’s grandmother, GyeongRyeon Cho (조경련) made her name. Gyeong means “Shining Jade (璟, 옥빛날 경)”, so she goes by Jade. She is a proud daughter of lifelong farmers, who cultivated rice and tomato in a “barley island (맥도)”, where Nakdong River meets the South Sea at Busan, South Korea.
You can contact Jade Ji by sji2@nd.edu, jadeji0515@gmail.com