Alum Youbin Kang (2024) was named one of two co-winners of the Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award from the Comparative Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. She’s currently a Moynihan Postdoctoral Fellow at the City College of New York and a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow at the New York Public Library.
Youbin’s dissertation, “Underground Labor and the Politics of Money in Public Transit,” examines the insolvent continuity and endurance of public transit infrastructures in New York City and Seoul between 1974 and 2022, two cities insufficiently supported by federal transit funding, home to large transit labor unions, and perennially facing questions of economic viability. The comparative project traces how labor relations and the classed and racialized recognition of workers produced divergent fiscal politics: New York City’s heavier reliance on debt instruments versus Seoul’s strategies of labor control through outsourcing, privatization, and automation.