2025-02-05

Eunki as a Researcher

By: eunki

^daisy: Try this track: Daisy by Bye Bye Badman

hi, i am

Eunki Joung. I am a prospective PhD student in HCI, Care, and Ethnography.

I studied with Prof. Uichin Lee at the Interactive Computing Lab, KAIST, where I recieved a Master’s degree in School of Computing.

If you want a formal introduction, please see my CV.

Or, a selected list of my writings.

As a researcher, I am interested in the following broad questions:

• Whose voices are invisible?
• How can we bring those invisible voices to public spheres¹?
• What should those public spheres look like?

experiences and fondness

At the same time, I have experiences with and fondness for the following objects:

• Programming languages and the artifacts realized by them.
  • I love Cumpa, a caring companion for mindful self-exploration, that I built with my colleagues. (Check it here: A CSCW 2025 paper)
  • As a magic wand that can make my imagination real and as lego blocks that can be arranged in perfect order, programming languages have been my favorite toys since I was a child. (You may find my fondness for the art of programming in this blog.)
  • But at the same time, I am opposed to the idea that programming languages, or moreover the computer science, are solely the magic wand that will solve all the problems without harm. (You may also find my thoughts on this in various places in this blog.)
  • Stay tuned! I will gradually update the projects I have been working on 🪼.
• Writing, especially those representing the everyday lives of people.
  • I love both my own writings and those of others!
  • Good writing! That is one of the key goals of my life journey, though my thoughts on ‘what is good writing’ will always be changing.
  • Before my own writings, let’s talk about the writings of others. Here is my (partial) list of favorite writings.
  • Ethnographies and Documentaries: Yes, this category is very broad. I intentionally left it broad to focus on their common questions: “What are the everyday lives of people like?” “What are the meanings of their everyday lives?” Addressing these questions, the texts in this category acknowledge that the ‘meanings’ are subjectively constructed by individuals, cultures, and structures. Thus, these texts put a lot of effort into visiting, observing, and representing particular sites.
    • One of my favorite texts is “Poverty as Process: The Arrangement of Poverty and the Anthropology of the Vulnerable Lives” by Prof. Mun Young Jo (Unfortunately, only the Korean version is available.).
    • Also, I love the book “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.” I first read this book in the social computing class led by Prof. Juho Kim, and it was the first time I thought that ethnographic studies and design in the HCI field might be my future path.
  • Theories: Again, a broad category. In my use, these are the texts that interpret the world (represented by a lot of available materials) through a particular lens. If this kind of work does not involve fieldwork, I call it a ‘theory.’
    • Please see Human, Place, Hospitality! Maybe for 10 times (again, I am sorry that only the Korean version is available). The main question of this book is: “When do we become human?” “Were we human since we were born? What kind of ‘hospitality’ let us be a member of society, and thus a human?” It covers various sites and identities (e.g., women, soldiers, disabled people) where they are excluded from or ‘conditionally included in’ society, and thus the position of ‘human’ is not guaranteed. I read this book when I was a college student, and its insightful theoretical viewpoints have been motivating me to study (not just advocate) the inclusion of marginalized, not ‘normal’ people.
    • ‘Normal,’ with the quotation marks? The former book had led me to be interested in Erving Goffman, a 20C sociologist who left a lot of insights on the construction of the ‘normal’ and the experiences and strategies of people who are not ‘normal,’ such as people with stigma, people in asylums, or people who fell into temporary ‘abnormal’ situations (See The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or Interaction Ritual). Among these, my favorite is Stigma (1963), which describes how stigmatized people manage their visible cues of identity like a game, revealing and concealing them strategically.
      • Also, Goffman investigated a lot about ‘symbolic’ interactions, such as greetings. If you want, you can give a warm greet to me here: The Guest Book.

good bye …

This post is evolving. I will add more in the future. Stay tuned!

Or, check my winter.