Dr. Taeyeon Kim

Scholar · Educator · Theorist · Transnational Author

Research and community building projects


This page highlights ongoing research collaborations and projects that extend my scholarly commitments to equity, epistemic transformation, and transpacific 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.
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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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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.
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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.