Ray Kim is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University who works primarily within the field of sociology of religion. His dissertation looks at how and why halal, an Islamic religious and legal category, became a hot button issue in South Korea starting in 2009. By taking a discourse analysis approach, he examines how halal became a contested category with socially constructed meanings, and explores the ways in which a religious category becomes secularized as it becomes interpolated into processes of commodification, industrialization, and globalization.