Lee Jiyeon
李知燕/이지연

Jiyeon Lee is a Master’s student in the Regional Studies – East Asia (RSEA) Program at Harvard University. She studies sociology using mixed methods, with a focus on immigration, gender, the state, and social change. Her intellectual passion particularly revolves around the legal and substantive dimensions of citizenship—how one’s access to rights and resources is determined by law and beyond. Her recent work delves into this question in the welfare state context. Focusing on the interactive negotiation processes between frontline workers and their welfare clients, she investigates how gendered, racialized, and classed ideals of citizenship are at play in these contexts, and how differing burdens and capacities to perform as deserving subjects reinforce social inequality. She also runs a collaborative project on public attitude formation toward immigrants and open immigration policy in the US, examining how shared experiences and family histories affect people’s empathy toward immigrants and policy opinions.