Biography
Wondong Lee is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Irvine. He studies the transnational epistemic communities of religious organizations in South Korea and the U.S., and their interaction with persons of different ethnicities, sexual orientations, and religious identities. North Korean (NK) communists and non-heterosexuals, along with Muslims, are considered the most disliked outgroups among Korean evangelicals. The North Korean regime and its supporters have long been considered the greatest enemy, but recently, many evangelicals claim that a global LGBT movement poses an existential threat to the liberties of Christians worldwide, including in South Korea. Lee's current project examines how Korean evangelicals emulate the general language of threat and outreach from their American counterparts and to what extent this contributes to making an alternative knowledge sphere/regime vis-à-vis the “scholarly” knowledge on sexuality. A global network of threat-oriented, Christian rights organizations and media disseminate stories of outgroups (e.g., North Korean regime, LGBT movement) threatening the lives and/or liberties of Christians. In contrast, humanitarian, outreach-oriented organizations frame outgroup members as objects of Christian love and outreach and attempt to engage in a dialogue for mutual recognization. His primary academic interests lie in the diffusion of interpretive frameworks among the transnational network of evangelicals that are embedded in their narratives, social imaginary, and collective sense-making. He’s attempting to critically look into the intersection of transnational religious activism, conservative legal mobilization, and the weaponization of victimhood as related to the Korean Christian Right's shaping of public discourses on socio-cultural conflict.