otherwise 1) In another way, differently; 2) Under other circumstances; 3) In other respects.

About

Hi. I'm Judy, a.k.a "dotorious," and I've been here on otherwise.net for nearly a decade. I'm not disciplined enough to maintain a thematically focused blog -- e.g. on political analysis or cultural criticism -- so this is pretty much a hodge-podge of things that pique my interest. I mostly blog about techie, geeky things, Korean/American cultural and political stuff, and progressive and activist politics and current events (especially concerning immigration, war and militarism, queer politics), but I also throw in random comparison shopping experiences, restaurant reviews, and photos of food. And dogs. I love dogs. What I don't often do is post personal things or academic matters, but I'm trying to be better about that.

Like many of you, I wear several hats. I'm a geek -- the amateur kind that friends call with questions about electronics purchases and in times of "oh my god, my computer just died" panic attacks. I've offered tech support for friends' moms thousands of miles away, and I've spent countless hours installing, tweaking, and uninstalling software for no good reason.

I did work as a professional geek for a few years in the mid- to late 1990s on an arts community networking initiative at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. After that, I was a geek for hire, a freelance nonprofit tech consultant, doing things like network design, web development, and print design projects. Eventually, I became tired of expropriating my own labor and exhausted by the endless workday, and quit freelancing. It had been an odd career path for an activist nerd with politics -- I was actually an English and women's studies major in college -- and by 2002, I was finally ready for graduate school.

So I went to graduate school in geography at UC Berkeley, and received my PhD in 2009. I am now a Postdoctoral Fellow (in Asian Studies 2009-2010, and in geography 2010-2012) at the University of British Columbia. I'm not the kind of geographer who does GIS mapping (though I'm very interested in cartography) or urban planning, and not the kind that analyzes climate change or the physical landscape of the Earth. (Gotcha -- some of you were thinking geology, weren't you?) My interests are in political and cultural geography that deals with theories and politics of space, power, and difference. I'm especially interested in mobility and subjectivity.

My dissertation has to do with global imaginaries and evangelical capitalism(s), with a focus on contemporary South Korean/Korean American missionaries. Part global ethnography and part political theology, it deals with several mission destinations as case studies: diaspora mission (China-North Korean border), development mission (Uganda, Tanzania), and "humanitarian" mission (Iraq, Afghanistan).

Here's my dissertation distilled into a 24-page comic form:
http://www.otherwise.net/?page_id=279

Interested in more of this? Here's a paper I wrote a while ago:
Missionary Destinations and Diasporic Destiny: Spatiality of Korean/American Evangelism and the Cell Church
Ju Hui Judy Han (April 27, 2005). Institute for the Study of Social Change. ISSC Fellows Working Papers. Paper ISSC_WP_01.

And finally, about another hat that I haven't donned in a while. I've been consumed with dissertation work over the last years, so I've been a slacker activist. I am a derelict Advisory Committee member of Dari Project which develops resources to increase awareness and acceptance in Korean American communities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) people. I was a core member of now-defunct Korea Solidarity Committee in Oakland, a group committed to principles of international solidarity and community activism. For many years, I worked with the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF), a national progressive feminist group with chapters in several states, and am on their list of "founding sisters." I was also a founding board member of Californians for Justice, a statewide grassroots organization that brings people of color, young people, and poor people together by leading base-building efforts for major public policy change, especially related to racial justice and immigrant rights, and once upon a time served on the Community Funding Panel of Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. I've been involved in lots of other activist groups, projects, and campaigns around queer, anti-racist, immigrant rights, and other social justice issues, and I'm sure I will always be.

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