Kim’s research interests center on gender, labor, and carework. She is co-editor of the volume, From Crisis to Catastrophe: Care, COVID, and Pathways to Change (Rutgers University Press 2023), with Mignon Duffy (University of Massachusetts Lowell) and Amy Armenia (Rollins College). The book examined the pandemic’s impact on the social organization of care in different countries around the world. She is co- series editor of the book series, Carework in a Changing World, with Mignon Duffy and Amy Armenia (also with Rutgers University Press).
Her current book, Who Cares About Parents?: Temporary Alliances, Exclusionary Practices, and the Strategic Possibilities of Parenting Groups (2025, Rutgers University Press) explores the dimensions of parenting groups’ carework practices and examines how parenting groups both foster and thwart access to care infrastructure. Despite their challenges, she found that parenting groups provide the possibility for strategic parenting – or parents’ provision of community based, nimble, and often scalable solutions to address parents’ care needs.
Her past research addresses diverse organizational settings including strip clubs, nursing homes, and home health care. Her 2010 book, Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work (NYU Press), examined the processes through which men and women wield, negotiate, and contest power in a gendered organization. She has published with Gender & Society, Sociology of Health & Illness; Research in the Sociology of Health Care; and Work, Employment & Society as well as other journals and in the edited volume, Caring on the Clock (Rutgers University Press 2015).