Do Jun Lee

Do Jun Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies at Queens College/CUNY. An environmental psychologist, his work and teaching critically examines the interrelationships of people, (im)mobilities, environment, and social justice. His research over the last several years has focused on a participatory action research project with the Biking Public Project and immigrant food delivery cyclists in New York City to examine the mobility and labor experiences on NYC streets from the food delivery worker perspective. This research helped spark the #DeliverJustice Coalition of food delivery workers and community organizations to mobilize a successful campaign to end criminalization of worker e-bikes. Do has also been involved in critical engagements of mobility and transportation scholarship such as The Untokening, and the Mobility Justice Research Network.

Desire Paths & Han: Scholar Activism with NYC’s Immigrant Food Delivery Workers

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In recent years, New York City’s food delivery workers, a largely Asian and Latina/o immigrant workforce, have struggled against being characterized and policed as public safety “problems” even as these same workers became essential but unprotected during the Covid-19 pandemic. To better unpack the temporality of desire paths of delivery workers, Prof. Do Jun Lee mobilizes han, an indigenous Korean word for the inherited and collective emotions of transgenerational trauma from systematic oppressions. As such, understanding how and why food delivery workers are simultaneously “essential” and a “problem” is to re-member the intertwined and complex histories of place, migrations, mobilities, labor, and governance, which opens up possibilities for redefining the “problem.”

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