UW–Madison alumna Sun Young Lee is the recipient of the 2025 Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies special interest group (SIG).
Lee, who earned her PhD from the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, is currently an assistant professor in the School of Education at Wichita State University.
Her research explores the politics of educational knowledge in areas including curriculum and instruction, teacher education, literacy education, and Asian American education. Using a variety of methodologies, she aims to promote educational equity and justice by engaging with the paradoxes found in well-intended educational policies and reforms.
Lee’s current research focuses on two primary areas: advancing transpacific sensibilities in education research and critically examining the role of “science” in education reform discourses, particularly within the science of reading reforms.
Originally from South Korea, Lee first came to the U.S. as an international PhD student in 2013. Drawing from her personal experiences, she has critically engaged with her “Asian” ethnicity in her scholarly work.
“While Asian Americans are often framed through ‘model minority’ and ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotypes, these U.S.-centric frames did not really capture the complexity of my experiences in the United States,” Lee explains. “My call for transpacific studies in education research aims to expand frameworks for understanding Asian Americans by shifting the focus from racialized experiences to the underlying epistemic systems and structures that make such racialization possible.”
Lee’s paper, titled “Transpacific Curriculum History: Undoing the Citational Practice of Global Whiteness in Education Reforms” and published in the Harvard Educational Review, has also received two recent awards: the East Asia SIG Best Paper Award from the Comparative and International Education Society and the Outstanding Research Paper Award from the Korean-American Educational Researchers Association.
In this paper, Lee presents a critical analysis of global whiteness, examining how citational practices rooted in white-centric perspectives perpetuate epistemic coloniality in education reforms.
The Harvard Educational Review team expressed their honor in publishing this “deeply nuanced and field-pushing article,” praising Lee’s “meticulous historical analysis of transpacific curriculum connections and powerful critique of global whiteness in educational knowledge systems.”