Dr Yoon Walker

Dr Yoon Walker is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS University of London.

Her doctoral research examined institutionalised human rights violations under South Korea's authoritarian governments between the 1960s and the 1980s, focusing on three institutions of confinement and forced labour: Sŏn'gam Academy, the Sŏsan Development Group, and Brothers Home. Reading these cases together against the administrative record, she argues that they were not isolated scandals but forms of state violence embedded in official policy, sharing strikingly similar structures, practices and forms of violence despite operating in different times and places.

Her current project turns from how violence was institutionalised to how its memory is made public, examining sites where places of repression have become places of public memory, such as the former Namyeong-dong Anti-Communist Investigation Office in Seoul, now the National Museum of Korean Democracy, and the May 18th Democratic Plaza in Gwangju. She is also developing her dissertation into a monograph.

• Modern and contemporary Korean history
• Human rights under South Korea's authoritarian regimes
• State violence, confinement and forced labour
• Transitional justice and truth commissions
• Memory, heritage and difficult/contested pasts
• Sites of conscience and public memory