I currently hold the Chair of British Cultures at the University of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland. Previously, I was a tenured Associate Professor in Law and the Director of the Anthropology and Law programme at the London School of Economics (LSE). Trained as both a lawyer and an anthropologist at the LSE and the University of Oxford, I am an interdisciplinary scholar who works ethnographically and collaboratively on questions of intersecting inequalities, political economy and the state. I believe that academics should actively work towards analysing and dismantling inequalities and I combine research with work in advocacy and social justice.
My first monograph entitled Personalizing the State: an Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers an ethnography of class, citizenship and punishment based on my long-term engagement with residents of a post-industrial council estate in austerity Britain. The book was awarded the 2020 Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics by the Socio-Legal Studies Association and was nominated for several other awards. I have also published in leading journals across anthropology, sociology and law, including on the criminal justice system, the welfare state, austerity politics, Brexit, and the democratic crisis in Britain. One of my recent and co-authored articles on social polarisation in England won the innovation/excellence paper award of 2022 by the British Sociological Association.
My current book project is on the British state’s discovery of 'modern slavery' against the backdrop of the country’s still often unacknowledged legacies of racial empire and transatlantic slavery. Focusing in on the case of domestic drugs trafficking – the so-called crisis of ‘county lines’ – I draw on multi-sited fieldwork in the British courts, government offices, police stations and grassroots communities to ask how ‘modern’ slavery policies co-exist alongside, disrupt and legitimise the afterlives of British empire at a time of peak inequality and crisis in Britain.
I am a visiting professor in Law and Anthropology at the LSE; a member of the LSE Mannheim Centre and a Faculty Associate of the International Inequalities Institute. I sit on a number of editorial boards, including for the journal of Theoretical Criminology, the Journal of Legal Anthropology, and Race & Class, the quarterly journal of the Institute of Race Relations. In 2016, I was appointed Academic Fellow at Inner Temple. I regularly contribute to public debates on inequality, law, politics, and the social effects of policy making in activist and advocacy circles, on social media and in policy forums. I was born and raised in Germany as the child of a Korean mother and a German father before moving to Britain on a scholarship for my University education.