Review of “Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do we survive the violence of neoliberal capitalism and support one another in our resistance? Sociologist Jennifer Jihye Chun and geographer Ju Hui Judy Han take readers along on their search for answers by focusing on protest sites in South Korea—from a spectacular mass gathering during the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017, with over a million people filling the streets in central Seoul, to a lone protester at the top of a crane demanding to be rehired. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with key activists, their book situates these protests within the larger landscape of South Korean social movements and their genealogies, providing a vivid account of people’s resistance. Chun and Han’s work is thus a testament to the enduring force of solidarity, bringing people together to protect one another against abandonment. The book offers a thorough examination of a diverse set of resistance tactics in South Korea that are physically challenging and often heart-wrenching to read about, such as a high-altitude occupation with no anticipated end date, slow-moving Buddhist prostration protests, and hunger strikes lasting over a month. Instead of viewing these actions merely as expressions of “desperation,” the book’s focus on protest repertoires engages with the affective and relational dynamics among protesters and their supporters who come together in solidarity. The authors show that such protests are grounded at their core in conditions of precarity, constituting “a structure of felling” (a la Raymond Williams), produced by neoliberal economic policies and the repression of union organizing under the rule of law. This is especially true for workers in precarious jobs, a disproportionate number of whom are women. By enunciating the suffering caused by capitalist abandonment and disposability, these intense actions invite others to provide critical support to protesters on the ground, without which their efforts could not be sustained. These essential practices bolster what Yoonkyung Lee (2022) calls “the national solidarity infrastructure” of South Korean social movements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".