Our Project Staff
Dr Shu Zhu
(Centre Assistant, Curtin University)
Dr Shu Zhu is the Centre Assistant of the Korea Research Centre. Her responsibilities include maintaining the Centre's social media content, organising and coordinating Centre activities such as workshops, seminars, and conferences, as well as engaging with external projects and activities related to the Centre.
Shu has recently completed her PhD thesis at the University of Western Australia. Her particular research interests lie at the intersection of ageing, ethnicity, gender, and migration studies. Her thesis is entitled “‘I'd Be A Monster If I Had No Wrinkles’: The Embodied Experiences of Ageing Among Older Korean and Chinese Migrants Living in Australia”. Her PhD project explores the ways in which older Chinese and Korean migrants perceive, manage and experience their ageing bodies in the context of diverse forms of bodily practices. By adopting an embodied approach, her thesis argues that the migrant ageing body is a bio-social space in which diverse power relations converge.
Dr Ana Tankosic
(Sessional Academic, MCASI, Curtin University)
Dr Ana Tankosić is a research co-investigator on the project “The Development of Korean Language Education in Western Australian Schools: Opportunities and Challenges” at the School of Media, Creative Arts, and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. Ana completed her PhD in sociolinguistics at Curtin University in 2023. She has been working as a sessional academic at Faculty of Humanities since 2020.
Her work explores transcultural and translingual identities and migration discourses with a particular focus on diversities and disparities experienced by culturally and linguistically diverse communities, as well as other sociolinguistic issues.
Ana is a Fulbright Alumna (Penn State University, PA).
Mimansa Jethro
Summer Research Scholarship Recipient, 2023/2024
Mimansa Jethro (BA Politics and International Relations, UWA; BA Honours candidate Curtin University) is a Curtin Faculty of Humanities Summer Research Scholarship recipient, based at the Korea Research Centre in MCASI to work on a research publication drawing on her recently completed Honours dissertation over the 2023/2024 summer break.
These 6-week scholarships are designed to assist final semester Honours and Masters by coursework students develop their research for publication in order to assist with future Higher Degree by Research (HDR) pathways. The outcome of the scholarship will be to complete a quality research output ready for submission, which Mimansa is currently completing under the supervision of Assoc/Prof Jo Elfving-Hwang on the topic of “The pursuit of happiness: Ontological (in)security and gendered populism during the 2022 South Korean presidential election”.
The research project and resulting publication will explore how ‘gender wars’ are increasingly conceptualised as an existential crisis for men and resisting feminism as a ‘survival game’ within Korea’s highly competitive neoliberal labour economy, which in turn have been utilised by some political actors to drive further ideological polarisation of domestic politics in South Korea.