5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) by Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalysts of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that are repeated across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, and abolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.

Critics Rina Agarwala, Bridget Kenny, Jong Bum Kwon, Marcel Paret, Yewon Lee, and Gökbörü Tanyildiz will participate in a dialogue about the significance of keywords such as solidarity, affect, care, infrastructure and place when it comes to protesting precarity. Critics will also discuss similarities and differences about the book’s key claims and interventions in relation to their own research in India, South Africa, South Korea and the U.S.