Soojin Kim

SOOJIN KIM, then a graduate student at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “Erase the Trace: Digital Data, Personhood, and the Right to Be Forgotten in South Korea,” supervised by Dr. Nicholas Harkness. This project examines how the right to be forgotten is sought and practiced, and how personal data removal from the internet reshapes or challenges the notion of the individual as a data subject. In South Korea, state-sponsored support systems for victims of digital sex crimes have provided counseling, legal assistance, image deletion and monitoring, and medical care since 2018, following a feminist resurgence against the widespread revelation of technologically facilitated gender-based violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2023-25) within victim-support institutions and feminist organizations, the grantee examines how data removal functions not merely as a technical work but as a process deeply entangled with the legal, institutional, cultural and political constitution of harm. The study asks what conditions enable or challenges the victim’s pursuit of their right to be forgotten, and how recovery can emerge from the disjuncture between material deletion and human forgetting. Ultimately, the project contributes gendered perspectives for rethinking right-based approaches to personal data control in contemporary digitalized society.