Seok Joo Youn

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.