Biography
June Park is a political economist specialising in US foreign economic policymaking on the export-oriented countries of Northeast Asia – China, Japan and South Korea. She works on trade, energy, and tech conflicts with a broader range of regional focuses not just on the United States and East Asia, but also Europe and the Middle East. She also conducts policy-oriented research on the two Koreas. Her grand theme of research is why countries fight and how, using what. She studies why countries have different policy outcomes by analysing governance structures – domestic institutions, leadership, and bureaucracies that shape the policy formation process. She is currently a Next Generation Researcher of the National Research Foundation of Korea and an Academic Book Publication Member at the National Library of Korea, now finalising her first book manuscript, Trade Wars & Currency Conflict: China, South Korea, and Japan’s Responses to U.S. Pressures.
Her second book project, Europe's Challenges & Responses: Between Faustian Bargains with China and U.S. Pressures since Brexit, also utilises the framework of institutional variance but moves the stage to Europe and broadens the scope to pressures from two great powers: China and the United States. She examines each of the policy responses from Germany, France and the UK post-Brexit to China and the United States in the trade, energy and tech policy realms in the era of geoeconomic conflict between the United States and China.
In response to the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus, she launched a standalone project entitled, “Governing a Pandemic: Beyond Massive Tracking and Data Privacy in South Korea to Counter COVID-19”. The project centres on the questions of a social contract on conditional AI-oriented surveillance, patents on health-related technology, and bureaucratic governance in governing a pandemic focusing on the South Korean case.
Plenary Panel Discussion (2020) | Covid-19 pandemic and the crisis of global politics: A view from Asia
