Professor Eunju Jo of the Department of Sociology at Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) received the Korean Sociological Association's 26th Academic Paper Award this year. The award ceremony took place on the 19th at the Korean Sociological Association's regular sociology conference held at Hanyang University. The Korean Sociological Association's Academic Paper Award is a prestigious honor presented annually to a researcher who has achieved the most outstanding scholarly accomplishment in the field of sociology.

The awarded paper is 'School Failure and Symbolic Violence: A Case Study of the Secondary Education Setting in Korea,' published in 2024 in <Korean Sociology>, Volume 58, Issue 1. Based on multi-year fieldwork at a middle school in Seoul, the study offers an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms driving inequality in Korean secondary education.

In the paper, Professor Jo departed from the conventional emphasis on entrance examination results and identified a structural contradiction in which schools implicitly operate on the presumption of support from certain families. She further reinterpreted the process by which students fail to become integrated members of the educational setting as 'symbolic violence' and concretely documented students' critical insights into the inequitable realities of education. The work was recognized for its scholarly significance.

Professor Eunju Jo currently serves as a non-standing director of the Korean Sociological Association, editor-in-chief of <Economy and Society> at the Critical Sociology Association, and Chair of External Cooperation of the Korean Association for Women's Studies, among other roles, maintaining active scholarly engagement. She also contributes to local community development as a member of Jeonju City's Gender Impact Assessment Committee (since 2023).