Dr. Taeyeon Kim - Research and community building projects

This page highlights ongoing research collaborations and projects that extend my scholarly commitments toward humanizing, relational, and justice-oriented inquiry.

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Falling into the Gap: Reframing Equity Beyond Deficit Narratives
Book Project with James Wright · Routledge, Under Contract

Co-authored with James Wright at Temple University, this book reframes educational equity beyond the deficit narratives embedded in gap-based discourses. Drawing on our earlier work on the coloniality of achievement gap discourses (Wright & Kim, 2023), we argue for equity frameworks grounded in humanizing pedagogies and epistemic justice, offering conceptual tools for leaders, researchers, and educators working to move past the language of the gap. This book extends our series of collaborative writings on critical policy and leadership analysis (See below).

This book project is funded by the University of Nebraska Lincoln Office of Research and Innovation Book Fellowship (August 2026-July 2027).

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Broadening Epistemic Foundations of Educational Leadership Thinking with Pacific Imaginations
Guest-Edited Special Issue · Educational Administration Quarterly, In Progress

Co-edited with Keita Takayama at Adelaide University and Derek Taira at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, this special issue convenes scholarship that draws on transpacific traditions of thought to broaden the epistemic foundations of educational leadership. Together, contributors ask what leadership becomes when it is theorized from beyond the Anglophone canon, and how transpacific lenses and Indigenous ways of knowing can reshape what counts as knowledge, method, and practice in the field.

As part of this special issue, my co-author and I published a paper theorizing "Leadership as Epistemic Transformation Toward Justice: Collective Knowledge-Making with Transpacific Liminality." See more details about this paper below.

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In my new article with Soo Bin Jang in Educational Administration Quarterly, I claim leadership as an act of epistemic transformation toward justice. I first draw on Miranda Fricker and Kristie Dotson to foreground the epistemic oppression persistently placed upon racialized communities, and to argue for leadership that recognizes the limits of the dominant epistemic system itself. I then show how such leadership takes shape through Korean American community leaders' collective knowledge-making toward justice, guided by transpacific liminality.

Read the full article: Leadership as Epistemic Transformation Toward Justice

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Transnational Inquiry Group
Collaborative Research Collective

A collective of Korean diasporic women scholars (Soo Bin Jang at the University of Delaware, Sun Young Lee at Wichita State University, and Jin Kyeong Jung at Texas Tech University) committed to reimagining qualitative inquiry as transnational, relational, and translinguistic practice. Together we have written on AsianCrit, relational writing as collective methodology, translanguaging as scholarly space, and playful collaboration as critical inquiry. Our work has appeared in Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, and Applied Linguistics Review.

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The Korea as Research seminar series, organized by Dr. Seungho Moon at Loyola University Chicago, has featured our group's collaborative projects on how Korean epistemology informs scholarly inquiry.

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Asian American Research Agendas in Educational Leadership: Reflexive Praxis for Racial Justice
Guest-Edited Special Issue · International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, In Press

Co-edited with Ann Ishimaru at the University of Washington, Van Lac at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Jia Liang, at Kansas State University, this special issue gathers Asian American scholarship in educational leadership as reflexive praxis for racial justice. Contributors trace the intellectual histories, methodological commitments, and community-rooted questions shaping the field, opening space for Asian American research agendas long overlooked within educational leadership discourse. The issue includes my co-authored article with Ann Ishimaru, "On our own terms: Asian diasporic onto-epistemologies of educational leadership as radical relationality," which theorizes leadership through frameworks of radical relationality.