Research Interests

Seok Joo Youn is an MPH/Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on end-of-life care, aging, intergenerational care, and the culture of medicine within the theoretical frames of kinship, care ethics, and institutions. Her Master's research, Hospital Ethnography on Catholic Hospice Palliative Care, was funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea. In this research, she examined the culture of dying and death created by hospice team members in hospital-based hospice and palliative care wards as an alternative path of hospital death in terms of space, relationship, practice, and discourse. As a certified hospice care worker, she continues studying end-of-life care issues to explore how hospitals, as frequent places of death for Koreans today, deal with and manage death and how family caregivers' agency has changed with the transitioning social norms and medical culture.