Research & Writing
Making sense of a changing world through stories, research, and critical reflection.
Saemi writes about artificial intelligence, digital transformation, media, and society— exploring how information, technology, and culture shape our shared future.
Featured Writing (peer-reviewed journal articles)
01
COVID-19 was a critical juncture for education. Powerful tech corporations seized the opportunity to “blitzscale” (Hoffman & Yeh, 2018) data-driven education technologies and push business-friendly policies and infrastructure (Williamson, 2021). Focusing on the case of South Korea, I argue that its pandemic-era policies on “AI textbooks” conflict with public values of education and worked to (1) frame education primarily as an optimization of human capital enhancement for state modernization, (2) further subjugate an already politically vulnerable education sector to technocentric solutions,and (3) consolidate a theory of education driven by techno-utopianism, which generates an important gap between the “perfect” imaginaries and actualities. These shifts add up to a neoliberal vision of the datafied school, in which longstanding debates around “better” education are ostensibly resolved through artificial intelligence and algorithmic technologies ranging from pervasive student surveillance, predictive analytics of student performance, and to hidden commodification of children’s everyday data.Keywords: AI textbook, education policy, dataveillance, datafication, COVID-19, EdTech, public value, AI and education, neoliberalism
02
Design Justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020) is a theory and a praxis used in social justice-oriented research that interrogates the question of “how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people” (Costanza-Chock, 2018, p.1). It helps us to rethink our relations to design processes and centers people who are normally unconsidered and marginalized by design. By using collaborative and creative approaches to address systemic issues of social justice in our communities, Design Justice serves as a powerful tool and research method to foster social movements.
03
This paper examines the overlooked history of Korean Canadian women keypunch operators (KPOs) in 1970–’80s Canada. KPOs were responsible for preparing computer-readable data and thus crucial to the emergence of business computing, machine learning, the digital humanities, and so much more, yet their labor and stories have largely been forgotten and consistently devalued. Management considered these jobs part of a “clerical ghetto” and struggled to find workers to fill and remain in these stressful and highly surveilled pink-collar jobs. Drawing on oral interviews and archival research, we show how these immigrant women navigated their workplace, which was shaped by racialized and gendered stereotypes—such as them having “nimble fingers.” Intriguingly for some, this job became a mental relief from domestic responsibilities and language barriers. Through this sense of being “free” and “independent” workers, we argue that KPOs exemplify an early form of gamified labor. Yet, unlike modern platformized labor, this was “treadmill labor”—labor without upward mobility. We also examine how Canadian multiculturalism reinforced ethnic divisions in the workplace, undermining cross-cultural solidarity and fostering ethnonationalist silos. By centering the voices and experiences of Korean Canadian women, this paper recovers a forgotten story of marginalized labor and offers a new origin point for understanding gamified work as foundational to the rise of computing and today’s digital economy.
04
Structured Participation Pathways: the case of AI-textbook in South Korea
Accepted for publication
Forthcoming in Learning, Media and Technology, special issue “How EdTech is Made.”
05
Vaccine hesitancy and research persona method
[Research in progress] This study examines how vaccine-related meanings are produced within algorithmically curated social media environments. Moving beyond accounts that locate vaccine hesitancy in exposure to distinct misinformation content, we conceptualize vaccine hesitancy as an emergent outcome of algorithmically structured exposure pathways.