Researcher Bio
Ka Young Ko is a modern history researcher specializing in the Soviet civil rights movement. Her studies have dealt with Sakharov’s peace ideology, the ’68 Movement, the Soviet resistance movement, the Soviet Free Trade Union, and the activities of the ‘Soviet Human Rights Protection Leading Group’ and the ‘Moscow Helsinki Group’. In addition, her research also covers the migration history and living culture of Goryo people in Moscow, Primorsky Krai, the Urals, Central Asia, and Ukraine. The Jewish repatriation movement of the 1970s, the ideas and activities of the Jewish Bunt during the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s anti-Semitism, and the characteristics of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Province in Siberia, and the migration of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia and their return to Crimea are also topics that she has researched.
Recently her research has also focused on the characteristics of the Karlak Memorial Museum’s reproduction of the ‘Karaganda Correctional-Labor Camp, and the reinterpretation of borderality in the exhibition of Uzbekistan’s “National Museum of Remembrance for Victims of Oppression” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.” By analyzing the composition of museum exhibitions in the Central Asian region, she looked at how memories of the past were utilized in response to the needs of nation-state formation. Central Asian elites’ response to the establishment of the Soviet federal government and the dynamics of the formation of national republic boundaries, which is an important topic in regarding regional formation, has also been a topic of interest.
Since May 2022, she has participated in the HK⁺ Mega Asia Research Project Group. In relation to the Mega Asia research agenda, she has conducted research on minority human rights, focusing on the struggles of disabled people who are restricted in their mobility rights (“Organized rights movement of disabled people in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s”). She has also explored the topic of the biopolitics of Mega Asia (“From the wife of someone who betrayed the fatherland to a citizen of the Soviet Union: Focusing on the struggle for recognition of women imprisoned in the Alzir camp”). Such research will enable future comparative studies on ‘naked lives’ in various regions of Asia. Additionally, by conducting research on refugees in Korea, she is exploring how a ‘Mega Asia’ and take root on Korean soil (“Inflow of Ukrainian war refugees and expansion of the Gwangju Goryeo people community”).