Award Name
Open Access Sophomore Award Winner
Researcher ORCID Identifier
0009-0007-2975-5633
Award Date
2026
Faculty Sponsor
Angelina Chin
Description/Abstract
This paper situates the efforts of disguised laborers in 1980s South Korea within the broader movement for democracy against then-President Chun Doo-hwan's rule. Resistance began in education, where high school and college-aged students began organizing through academic and social channels across the country. To leverage the platforms students had built on campuses post-Kwangju, many students, either suspended or graduated, disguised themselves as academic elites to enter factories and sweatshops to work with and radicalize laborers. The analysis identifies the types of interactions between disguised laborers and full-time laborers and provides historical reasoning for how this process catalyzed the impactful set of labor protests in the early 1990s.
Terms of Use & License Information
Recommended Citation
Kwon, Jun, "Power of Sogurup: How Disguised Intellectuals Mobilized Korea’s Labor Sector" (2026). 2026 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award. 3.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cclura_2026/3
