Inspired by the feminist concept of "epistemic injustice," which occurs when a speaker fails to be socially recognized as a legitimate knowledge producer, I explore how mothers experience epistemic injustice and how they are empowered to challenge it. To better understand the dynamics between mothers and society, I take a two-fold approach. On one hand, I examine how symbolic structures, such as morality and legality, shape the idealized image of mothers of disabled children, serving as symbolic oppression that hinders their social and political participation. On the other hand, I explore how mothers counter this oppression to challenge the misinterpretation of their lives and transform their living situations by creating their own words and experiences as symbolic resources. For example, my article published in Ethos discusses the psychological tension mothers experience between their long-standing oppression and their attempts at symbolic transgression. I am continuing this line of research in my current book project.

From a postcolonial perspective, I am interested in examining how Western-centric human rights and disability justice discourses have been translated and vernacularized in East Asian contexts. Primarily, by focusing on the global spread of the Independent Living Movement, I investigate how the core concepts of independence, autonomy, and independent living have been integrated into policy texts. For example, in an article published in Disability & Society, I analyzed how Korean Personal Assistance Services have incorporated these foreign ideals into legislative and administrative texts. Additionally, I am currently researching how public housing services designed to support the independent living of disabled people in Korea have paradoxically become mechanisms of segregation while intertwining with the affective dimensions of disabled life. After this research, I plan to expand it into a comparative study between Japan and Korea to better understand the interplay of symbolic dimensions in urban communities.

​Expanded from my second project, this research explores the meanings of care, independence, and interdependence in the experiences of carers across different sociocultural contexts. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how these meanings evolve in the social construction of the self and how they are enacted as carers' life stories in everyday spaces. For example, I recently drafted an analysis of how mothers of disabled children reinterpret the Western concept of independence within their sociocultural understanding of the self, not only for their children but also for themselves, as they create space to imagine an independent self. Empirically, I plan to explore everyday spaces to examine diverse life stories of carers in the U.S. and East Asia. Theoretically, I aim to contribute to current debates on interdependence within feminist care ethics while critically assessing its limitations in the context of disability care outside the Global North.