Jieun Cho

Jieun Cho is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, specializing in gender, environment, and health. Her research ("Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan") investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. Various stages of her dissertation research have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate School at Duke University. She served as a Contributing Editor for Anthropology News and as a board member of the Society for East Asian Anthropology between 2021 and 2024. As a postdoctoral researcher, she seeks to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on social reproduction, toxic ecologies, and environmental futures from the perspective of post-Cold War East Asia. Her research interests include: feminist care ethics, precarity and affect, gender and nation, anthropology of senses, place-making, disaster and crisis, and the Anthropocene. https://www.jieuncho.net/