AECD Student Awarded for Helping Marginalized Women Reach Out to their Communities

Yukyung Kim-Cho, a PhD student in the Adult Education and Community Development Program (AECD) and the Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, has won the City of Toronto Women's Studies Scholarship. This scholarship encourages gender analyses of community studies and public policy, including studies in the areas of transportation, housing, urban planning, employment, public works and municipal services. The event titled "Social Justice and the City: A conversation with Kristyn Wong-Tam" held on March 13, 2013 marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the City of Toronto Women’s Studies Scholarship.

After graduating in Mathematics at the College of Education at Dankook University, South Korea, Yukyung moved to Toronto to obtain her Master's degree at York University and continued working with marginalized women as an educator, support service provider, and researcher in Parkdale, Bloor/Ossington and Regent Park. She explains that feminist changes could occur anywhere and from any ordinary moment. The years she spent as a volunteer and activist working with women's organizations offering feminist peer counselling and community education for women and youth experiencing violence and discrimination in South Korea, were just a start to her involvement in a social justice movement in Toronto.

Her current areas of interest include transnational feminism, specifically Maria Lugones' "world"-traveling theory, feminist self-making, arts-informed narrative writing and research, and the writing of Women of Colour and Third World Women. Yukyung's doctoral research project is titled "Transnational Feminist Self-Making: A self-narrative-based study on Otherness and Inbetweenness." It investigates the ethnic, cultural and political “otherness and inbetweenness” immigrant and aboriginal women experience, and how they incorporate their political values, personal needs and desires for settlement/belonging into daily life in the city. Yukyung hopes that her work will encourage marginalized women, service providers, educators and activists in the community to continue working against racism and urban poverty, towars gender justice.

Please visit Yukyung's blog dedicated to conversations, both verbal and through images, that explore transnational/cross-cultural life of othered women, who pursue feminist and social justice values and possibilities of narrative-based qualitative studies.

For more information on the City of Toronto Women's Studies Scholarship visit the scholarship's website

Yukyung playing pungmul (Korean folk drumming) for Ji-shin-balp-gi (a Korean traditional community ritual for the first full moon of the year, Korea Town (Bloor street between Christie and Bathurst Street), Toronto, 2005)