Hye-Su Kuk

Hye-Su Kuk is an Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Her research investigates the nuances of “participation” within public spheres—particularly community organizations, everyday political spaces, social movements—through the lens of learning and education. Working with concepts such as social movement learning, activist learning, and democratic citizenship learning, she uses ethnographic and comparative approaches to examine how activist-educators in South Korea navigate the hybrid conditions of coloniality, neoliberalism, and Cold War legacies to cultivate more participatory forms of democracy. She also collaborates with community organizations in Toronto to explore everyday political practices and the possibilities for grounding critical pedagogy in community-based work. Through empirical analyses of the tensions and contradictions of participation on the ground, she investigates how the ideals of democracy, which are often Western-centred, are being challenged, negotiated and reconstructed.

A second strand of her scholarship centres on the politics of knowledge production, informed by her position as an international, non-Western scholar. Her recent article in Adult Education Quarterly brings a postcolonial perspective into adult learning theory, critiquing developmental assumptions in expansive learning theory and proposing “enunciatory learning” as a postcolonial alternative. She is additionally building on the concept of de-imperialization, beginning from an East Asian standpoint and working toward frameworks for solidarity across diverse groups differently shaped by colonialism and imperialism. Her work in this area focuses on how solidarity against colonialism and imperialism can be built across distinct histories, positionalities, and manifestations of colonial power.