Seok Joo Youn earned her B.S. in Anthropology and Human Biology from Emory University in 2016 and M.A. in Anthropology from Seoul National University (SNU) in 2020. Before coming to Washington University in St. Louis, she worked at the Korean National Institute for Bioethics Policy and SNU laboratory of molecular pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. She studies problems of end-of-life care, hospice and palliative care, graying, and intergenerational family care in Asian communities. Her recent research, Hospital Ethnography on Catholic Hospice Palliative Care, was supported by the SNU Anthropology Department’s Development Fund Scholarship and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government. She examined the culture of death created by hospice team members in palliative care as an alternative path of hospital death in terms of space, relationship, practice, and discourse by examining the case of the palliative care ward at a Catholic medical institution in Seoul. She continues studying end-of-life care issues at the palliative care ward in South Korea to explore how hospitals, as frequent places of death for Koreans today, deal with and manage death.
Scholar Voices Feature
Seok Joo Youn Wins Wenner-Gren Grant for Innovative Terminal Care Research
Seok Joo Youn, a 2020 cohort McDonnell Scholar, aims to broaden the understanding of the ever-changing dying culture in today’s rapidly aging world. Her dissertation research was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Dissertation Field Work Grant. Her study, “Terminal Caregiving: Investigating Hybrid Solutions to Dying in an Aging Society,” focuses on how the influx of non-family caregivers, norms of good care, and the culture of medicine affect family caregivers’ role in the terminal care network. This research is critical as it highlights the novel caregiving compositions of family and non-family caregivers and represents a hybrid solution that combines traditional values with institutionalized healthcare.
Seok Joo Youn is currently an MPH/PhD candidate in the Anthropology department. As a trained and certified Hospice and Palliative Care worker, she is conducting her research at two hospice and palliative care units at the university-affiliated hospitals in South Korea.