Jaehee Yi

Dr. Jaehee Yi anchors her social work scholarship in story, relationships, and lived experience. Drawing on decolonial, poststructural, critical, and arts-based approaches, she uses storytelling, imagery, metaphor, digital storytelling, and autoethnography to explore health and illness, gender, disability, migration, grief, relationships, and belonging. She has a longstanding program of scholarship in psychosocial oncology. Her transnational and collaborative work connects communities and scholars across Canada, the United States, South Korea, Finland, Japan, Argentina, and beyond, with current projects focusing on transgender love and relationships in later life, women with disabilities, cancer experiences and communication, migration, resilience, and posttraumatic growth.

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Background

Dr. Yi was born and raised in Korea, where experiences of childhood poverty profoundly shaped her life and intellectual development. Before entering social work, she studied literature and linguistics, pedagogy, and interpretation and translation, and worked in education, finance, and communication. After moving to the United States in 2003, she earned an MSW from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Social Work from the University of Southern California. She spent 11 years on the faculty of the University of Utah College of Social Work before joining the University of Victoria School of Social Work in 2022. Outside academia, she enjoys cooking, baking, and feeding family and friends—because stories of relationships, community, migration, and belonging are rarely complete without food.