Seungmi L. Cho

Seungmi Laura Cho (she/her), MSW, is a doctoral candidate in social welfare at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work. Seungmi also received her master’s and bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Recently, Seungmi conducted dissertation research in Seoul, Korea as a Fulbright U.S. student award recipient for the 2022-2023 academic year. Seungmi’s critical interdisciplinary research is broadly motivated by Black feminism’s intersectional theorization of reality as structured by race, class, and gender. She investigates, therefore, so-called socioemotional and behavioral problems that are associated with “adoption status” and “racial difference” as problems with the normalization of white supremacy—not merely problems with vulnerable adopted individuals of color.

Seungmi’s forthright anti-racist, intersectional feminist research is made possible through U.S. multicultural student activism and multinational coalitional organizing in Seoul, Korea. Previously, Seungmi acted as the Adoptee Relations Coordinator at the KoRoot Guesthouse and NGO (2013-2014), and served on the Adoptee Solidarity Korea steering committee (2012-2015). She also contributed monthly to Gazillion Voices Magazine (2013-2015) and self-published on her personal blog “Coloring Out: To Yellow and Queer the Construction of Lori Jane” (2011-2014). Using her previous name, Laura Klunder, the New York Times Magazine used her adoption case number, K85-160, as a narrative path to its cover story, “Why a Generation of Adoptees is Returning to South Korea” (January 15, 2014). Seungmi has since re-named herself to make visible her Korean family’s contribution to “anti-adopterism” –a lifelong personal and political project that advances adoptee solidarity as an anti-racist alternative to the false notion of adoptee racial exceptionalism.