Research

Dissertation (Expected Defense: 2025)

"The Ethics of Victimhood: How Victimhood Can Be a Positive Political Resource" 

My dissertation examines the ethical dimensions of victimhood politics. While victimhood is often viewed negatively across disciplines, I develop an affirmative normative account of its political significance, arguing that it can serve as a significant resource for resisting oppression. I also propose normative criteria for evaluating victimhood-based political actions and offer a set of ethical guidelines for how the oppressed might engage in resistance.

The first two chapters advance a positive account of victimhood as a political tool by challenging prevailing assumptions. Chapter One critiques the view that invoking victimhood undermines agency, arguing instead that recognizing and publicly claiming one's victim status can strengthen political agency by enabling more effective resistance. Chapter Two addresses concerns that mobilizing victimhood destroys constructive political relationships, arguing that it can facilitate affective communication--a vital form of political communication uniquely enabled by certain forms of victimhood-based action. The final chapter turns to key ethical questions about victimhood politics: If victimhood can serve as a positive political asset, how should victims navigate their experiences as political agents? How should they relate to others who have experienced oppression but reject victimhood--for example, women who deny the victim status of women under patriarchy? How should victims respond to political or moral critiques from non-victims? Through these inquiries, the dissertation ultimately asks: What should our attitude be toward victimhood in political life? This important question, I argue, has been obscured by the dominance of dismissive views of victimhood politics. 

Publications

2025, "Victimhood as a Positive Political Resource," European Journal of Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851241308809 

Abstract: Victimhood is commonly deemed negative. The dominant account of victimhood argues that leveraging victimhood involves asserting the moral superiority of the weak, leading to an oversimplification of complex political matters into moral binaries of good versus evil. According to this perspective, victimhood traps victims in a perennial position of weakness, thereby diminishing their agency. This paper challenges this negative perspective and argues that victimhood can enhance agency, serving as a positive political resource. When victimhood involves the acknowledgment of inherent vulnerability shared by all individuals, whether they are victims or non-victims, and concerns the unjust distributions of vulnerability experiences, it can empower individuals to overcome excessive self-doubt and transform their victimization into a political agenda. By examining the subway protests organized by Korean Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination activists, I demonstrate how recognizing the agency-enhancing potential of victimhood helps us better understand the political significance of these actions.

Keywords: victimhood; vulnerability; protest; disability; agency

Work in Progress

"Challenging Emotional Privilege: Disruptive Resistance as Affective Communication"

Abstract: This article examines the communicative potential of disruptive resistance, focusing on subway protests organized by disability rights activists in South Korea. Targeting rush-hour commuters, these protests provoked anger, frustration, and anxiety. While conventional accounts emphasize persuasion as the main communicative function of resistance, I argue that such protests represent affective communication by victims of oppression. They challenge non-victims’ emotional privilege by making forcing them to confront their own vulnerability, thereby disrupting affective power relationships where the emotional burden of political change falls disproportionately on victims, while non-victims remain detached. I then highlight a communicative dilemma victims face: because disruptive protests are often seen as counterproductive to communication, victims are pressured to choose between persuasion and disruption in isolation, each carrying risks of communicative failure. This dilemma presents a significant normative challenge, contributing to the devaluation of victims’ resistance. This article calls for a reassessment of disruptive protests as a form of communication.

Keywords: affective communication; affective power relationship; communicative dilemma; disruptive resistance; emotional privilege

"Do Governments Have a Responsibility to Support Counter-Speech?"

Abstract: This paper argues that governments have a responsibility to support the counter-speech of hate speech victims, particularly in institutional settings such as schools and workplaces. Hate speech can silence its targets, especially when they lack the resources to respond effectively. Drawing on Seana Shiffrin's thinker-based theory of freedom of speech, I argue that this silencing undermines victims' moral agency—their ability to develop and express personal perspectives, beliefs, and principles through speech—particularly in contexts crucial to individual development and social participation. Because safeguarding moral agency is a fundamental governmental responsibility, addressing the silencing effects of hate speech is essential. However, punitive measures against hate speech are inconsistent with the thinker-based framework. I therefore propose a policy approach centered on supporting victims' counter-speech. To illustrate how this responsibility might be fulfilled, I refine Katherine Gelber’s "speaking back" policy, which calls on governments to provide institutional, material, and educational support to enable victims to respond. I suggest two theoretical modifications: first, the thinker-based framework offers a stronger normative foundation for this policy than Gelber’s reliance on the capabilities approach; second, it should consider the possibility that counter-speech may itself take the form of hate speech. 

Keywords: hate speech; counter-speech; speaking back policy; freedom of speech; thinker-based theory

In Preparation

"Self-Exploitation and the Case for Work Hour Limits"

This paper argues for the implementation of work hour limits as a policy response to protect workers from self-exploitation, a tendency driven by internalized capitalist pressures.

"Law and Ordinary People: Revisiting the Concept of Law from Below"

This paper proposes a theoretical revision of H. L. A. Hart's legal positivism by highlighting the active normative role that ordinary citizens play in sustaining a legal system.

"Rethinking Resistance: Victimhood and Agency in Feminist Perspective" (invited chapter for an edited volume)

This chapter challenges masculinist conceptions of resistance and reinterprets the role of victimhood in shaping women's political agency within collective resistance.

• A paper examining the political and moral implications of 'pretty privilege,' analyzing it as a form of 'privileged victimhood' that complicates conventional explanations of oppression and victimhood.

• A paper exploring the political implications of AI for workers, arguing that its simultaneous empowerment of a small number of exceptionally skilled individuals and disempowerment of the broader workforce represents a new form of inequality distinct from traditional patterns of unequal labor rights protection.