Professor Choi Saet-byul of the Department of Sociology Appointed President of the Korean Sociological Association N
- Date2025.12.23
- 318
Professor Choi Saet-byul of the Department of Sociology at Ewha Womans University has been appointed as the 68th President of the Korean Sociological Association. Professor Choi was elected as President-elect through a competitive election at the Association’s General Assembly on December 20, 2024, and will officially begin her one-year term on January 1, 2026.
Professor Choi is widely recognized as a leading academic authority who has played a central role in the formation and development of cultural sociology in Korea. She is regarded as a pioneering theorist and researcher who introduced and empirically established theories of cultural capital and symbolic boundaries within the Korean social context. Through a broad and in-depth body of articles and books addressing culture, social class, taste, and inequality, she has offered penetrating analyses of the structure and transformation of Korean society. Her work, which combines theoretical rigor with empirical social analysis, has significantly expanded the intellectual horizons of cultural sociology. In 2024, she served as President of the Korean Association for Cultural Sociology, where she actively promoted the academic growth and participation of early-career scholars and helped establish a structure that enabled strong engagement of emerging researchers centered on academic conferences. Through these efforts, she played a key role in institutionalizing cultural sociology as an independent field of research.
Founded in 1957, the Korean Sociological Association is the leading academic organization representing sociology in Korea. It has worked to promote sociological and related social science research and to facilitate scholarly exchange. Since its establishment, the Association has built the institutional foundations of sociological research in Korea and fostered solidarity and expansion within the academic community. It continues to play a central role in the discipline by advancing sociological analyses of Korean society and accumulating scholarly achievements. The Association also publishes its official academic journal, Korean Sociology, and organizes regular academic conferences and various scholarly events to share research outcomes, thereby contributing not only to the development of sociology in Korea but also to sustained academic exchange with the international scholarly community.
Professor Choi stated, “In an era in which fragmented individuals collectively shape everyday life and society, sociology must fulfill the academic role of rereading isolated experiences within their structural contexts.” She added, “By reflectively mediating the disconnection between individual lives and social conditions, I will strive to open new horizons of thought through which sociology can move beyond the fragmentation and uncertainty facing our society and toward renewed solidarity and publicness.”