Brittany Suh is a researcher and scholar from South Korea. Her research focus is examining how marginalized communities, especially immigrant women and women of color, navigate their experiences of exclusion and marginalization in their everyday lives. Special attention is paid to how they navigate situations that are non-legal, unsafe, or high-risk, with limited resources and social capital in hand.

Her dissertation research, Illicit Blocks of Ethnic Enclaves: Asian Migrant Sex Work in the Ethnic Neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles, examines how Asian migrant sex workers navigate ethnic networks and communities to survive and thrive in the urban neighborhoods of NYC and LA, using geospatial analysis and ethnographic methods. She is interested in how marginalized women of color understand their work and negotiate their agency within the conditions of communal, social, financial, and legal restraints. Her dissertation project has been funded by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant , among others, and presented at the ASA, ASC (American Society of Criminology), and United Nations conferences.

She is also participating in two National Science Foundation(NSF)-funded research projects regarding domestic violence survivors and service providers in the United States. The first project is a collaborative project between John Jay College of Criminal Justice and George Mason University, which aims to understand service providers’ challenges and best practices in serving domestic violence survivors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Special attention is paid to organizations serving BIPOC and immigrant communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and survivors with disabilities. The second project collaborates with the College Wellness Center, Saheli (a service-providing organization), and a technology team to develop an app that assists domestic violence survivors in accessing necessary resources, risk assessment, and other support.

She is a passionate teacher-scholar who centers reflective and participatory pedagogy in her praxis. Brittany has taught sociology, media, and criminology courses at Queens College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Occidental College, New York University, and others. She has also served as a Writing Fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and provided mentorship and research training to undergraduate and graduate students in South Korea, New York City, and Los Angeles. Her passion for teaching and pedagogy stems from her personal experience as a struggling student from South Korea who moved to New York City for her studies. She seeks to especially support immigrant, first-generation, and women of color students who lack the social and cultural capital valued in higher education.

She received her M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University as a Steinhardt Graduate Fellow and her B.A. in Mass Communication and Korean Law from Handong Global University, graduating Magna Cum Laude.