Seok Joo Youn

SEOK JOO YOUN, then a graduate student at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “Terminal Caregiving: Investigating Hybrid Solutions to Dying in an Aging Society,” supervised by Dr. Geoff Childs. This dissertation explores how hospice and palliative care wards in South Korea reshape the relational, moral, and spatial order of dying amid rapid population aging and an acute care-focused hospital system. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2024–June 2025) in the HPC wards of two Catholic university hospitals in Seoul, the study examines how patients, families, and health care practitioners negotiate what it means to die well within institutional settings. With the changing structure of families, the rise of women’s employment, and demographic change, the culture of end-of-life caregiving has changed dramatically. Situated at the intersection of these social transformations, the study focuses on how caregiving relationships diversify and how bureaucratic systems both reflect and constrain these emerging relationships. Through participant observation, interviews, and spatial analysis, the research reveals that even within highly institutionalized settings, care can exist in a variety of forms. Focusing on caregivers, including elderly husbands, middle-aged children, non-legal partners and friends, and hospice team members, this study reveals how caregiving is motivated, conflicted, and sometimes thwarted. By illuminating these moral and relational dynamics, this project contributes to anthropological understandings of care, kinship, and death in aging societies.