Jaehee Yi

Dr. Yi anchors her social work actions and activities on story. As a former Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Graduate Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, she has worked with and for people who are touched by cancer. She uses imagery, art, metaphor, and story in research based on decolonial and post-structural frameworks. She has been working transnationally and plans to enhance her transnational work further in the future. As the first cohort of Social Work Health Futures Lab, she is interested in capturing signals about the futures, forecasting, and creating a future together in the community. She is vigorously writing a new social work textbook on human development from decolonial perspectives, which is scheduled to be published in 2025.

Background

Dr. Jaehee Yi was born and raised in Korea. She perceives that poverty in childhood shaped much of her personal experience and growth. She studied various disciplines in undergraduate and graduate programs in Korea, including literature and linguistics, pedagogy, and simultaneous interpretation and translation, and worked in diverse workplaces, such as school education, finance and accounting, and communication. With women’s rights advocacy in Korea and United Nations internship in Jakarta, Indonesia, she started her career focus on social work. Upon moving to the United States in 2003, she earned a MSW in the University of Michigan and PhD in social work at the University of Southern California. After working as a professor at the University of Utah, College of Social Work for 11 years, she moved to Canada and joined the School of Social Work, University of Victoria in 2022.

She is always in her kitchen, cooking, baking, and feeding family and friends; our story is not complete without food!