Spotlight on: Hazel Yeoun Choi
We’re delighted to introduce Hazel Yeoun Choi as part of our PhD/ECR Spotlight Series. As a PhD Candidate at Cardiff University, she researches the everday lives of women under authoritarian rule in Iran and North Korea.
Find out more about Hazel below and connect via LinkedIn. You can also visit her research profile.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I'm a third-year PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations at Cardiff University, on an ESRC studentship. My thesis examines how women in Iran and North Korea live with, and quietly resist, authoritarian rule in their everyday lives.
The project started from two places that had nothing to do with each other at the time. I spent a year in Tehran as an exchange student, and the moment that stayed with me was almost too small to explain: women wearing the hijab, technically compliant, but pushed back just far enough to leave their fringe showing. It wasn't nothing. I remember thinking, this is it, this is what I want to study.
The other thread is my grandmother. My grandparents came from North Korea, and she once told me an old saying from home: a woman is like dried pollock, you have to beat her properly if you want her to listen. At some point the two threads came together, and that became my PhD.
Before the PhD I worked for a defence company in Korea, then interned at SIPRI in Stockholm, and spent a year and a half in Washington DC on Iran-related work. I've lived in the UK for about four years now, and still haven't made peace with the weather.
On weekends I cycle, usually the Bristol to Bath trail and back, no phone, no research, just the wind, which has become quietly essential. I also love live music and small gigs, and when I'm missing home, I put on a Korean drama.
What are your research interests?
My work sits at the intersection of feminist IR, post-structural theory and resistance studies. I'm interested in how authoritarian power reaches into ordinary life, and what women do with it once it arrives.
That question isn't only about authoritarian states. Before the PhD I worked in the defence industry, an environment that's still overwhelmingly male. I found myself drawn to the people who quietly survived and pushed back inside that kind of pressure. Maybe it wasn't so different from the life I'd already been living. I ask a version of the same question there: how power still reaches into women's everyday working lives, even somewhere not formally authoritarian.
Theoretically I work with Foucault on governmentality, Bourdieu on doxa and symbolic violence, Kandiyoti on patriarchal bargains, and Scott on hidden transcripts. Alongside the thesis I'm preparing an article on refusal of complicity.
Who is your favourite feminist icon?
Honestly, the truest answer is the women who let me interview them, in Iran and in North Korea. They taught me almost everything I know about resistance, each fighting her own private battle in her own kitchen, her own marriage.
If you want names, the first is Kyung-wha Kang, who became South Korea's first female foreign minister in 2017. Growing up in Korea, I had never seen a woman stand at that podium. It quietly changed what felt available to me.
The second is Jina Mahsa Amini. My master's thesis was on the protests that followed her death. The movement that took her name changed how a generation of Iranian women talk about their own lives. That shows up in almost every interview I do.
What are three sources you would recommend to others interested in feminist IR generally or your research topic in particular?
The book I'd hand to anyone asking what feminist IR actually does. Pratt takes geopolitics out of the abstract and puts it back where it's lived, in women's bodies, across generations of activism.
The sharpest account I know of the Iranian state as fragmented, producing effects it never intended. Saeidi's shift from elite institutions to everyday encounters sits close to the spine of my thesis.
Most Iran-North Korea comparisons stop at nuclear weapons. Dukalskis compares them on completely different ground: the everyday work regimes do to look legitimate rather than merely feared. That felt genuinely fresh.
What's next for you?
Right now, fieldwork. I finished the Iran case study, and I'm in Seoul interviewing North Korean women who've resettled in the South. Once I'm back, the real work starts: findings chapters. I still need to complete a placement as part of my ESRC training, ideally with an organisation working on women's rights or migration.
I'm also organising an event at Cardiff this coming October, a talk by former North Korean and now British politician. It's the first time I've organised something like this. It's also made me notice how much academic life here leans towards Europe and the West, with East Asia getting far less room. I'd like to keep closing that gap over my career.
I also don't think of my thesis as a one-off. I'd like to keep researching women's everyday resistance under authoritarian rule as something closer to a series. The plan is to move out from Iran and North Korea into other authoritarian contexts