Research

I am a transdisciplinary scholar conducting critical research in the Department of Global  and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. I obtained my PhD in Development  Studies at the China Agricultural University, and spent a year of my doctoral studies at Cornell University’s Department of Development Sociology. My scholarship is rooted in China but globally  oriented, focusing on food safety, agroecology, and the political, ecological, and economic dimensions  of the COVID-19 pandemic, including both its origins and its impacts in food supply chains. I am  also an award-winning teacher and mentor, drawing upon my own experience as a woman of color  and first-generation college graduate to contribute to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in  academia. Ultimately, my scholarship connects race/ethnicity, gender, health, and environment to  address the most pressing global challenges of our time. 

My first book, The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism, was published  with Stanford University Press. This brief monograph (of 40,000 words) is a study of the roots of the  current pandemic in the entanglement of Chinese authoritarianism and global capitalism, which  sacrifices the environment and vulnerable populations in ways that increase the risk of zoonosis (the  emergence of diseases that “spill over” from animals to humans). Thus, my book shifts debate away  from narrow cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks that dominate current discussion of the  origins of COVID-19, emphasizing that we must understand emerging diseases with pandemic  potential in the more complex and structural entanglements of state-making, science and technology,  and global capitalism. My book also argues that the measures to strengthen public health, biosecurity,  and drive economic recovery in China have been effective to contain the epidemic, but they don’t  address the structural social, economic, and racial/ethnic inequalities and environmental issues giving  rise to emerging infectious diseases in the first place, but may even reinforce the risk of future  pandemics. This research builds upon my longstanding scholarship on rural development and public  health governance in China. So when news of the outbreak at a wet market in Wuhan first broke out,  I began systematically archiving digital materials that formed the empirical backbone of my research  for this book. I have continued my innovative methodological engagement with digital living archives  in forthcoming book chapters on “China’s state and social media narratives about Brazil during the  COVID-19 pandemic” and “Researching China during a period of COVID-19 travel restrictions.” I  also published an opinion piece in Al Jazeera tackling the racist narratives that circulate (even among  high-level government officials) about the origins of COVID-19 in China. Moreover, this first book  was written in a very quick way so it can be timely. But I already have a proposal for a new full length  monograph on Pandemics in China: Culture, Power, and Environment, which will expand this  analysis from COVID-19 all the way back to the Black Death. I already presented this book proposal  to Stanford University Press, and I intend to develop this manuscript in the coming two years. 

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, my intention was to continue fieldwork in China on  environmental health and justice related to food safety, particularly the rise of new urban-rural  inequalities expressed through unequal exposure to environmental intoxication, shifting access to  organic foods, and associated chronic health problems, and how they articulate with the politics of  gender and ethnicity/indigeneity in China. When my travel plans were disrupted by the onset of the  pandemic, I rapidly pivoted to incorporate not only the origins of the pandemic, but also its impacts  here in our communities in the US into my research agenda. I am Co-PI of an interdisciplinary project  awarded $1 million dollars by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture – USDA (including  $92,057 sub-awarded for UCI) to examine disruptions to food supply chains due to the COVID 19 pandemic in California, Florida, and the Midwest. We are adapting surveys developed for climate  change-induced disruptions of agricultural production by incorporating greater attention to issues of  race/ethnicity, gender, and resilience along the entire food production, processing and distribution  supply chain. Beyond a mere impact assessment, we are analyzing the emergence of alternative food  networks that enable vulnerable and marginalized actors in food supply chains (primarily women and racialized minorities) to adapt during this crisis, and co-designing resources and strategies for  cultivating greater resilience during future disturbances. Our team just submitted our first findings to  the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and now I am focusing on the preparation of an article  for World Development on uneven impacts and access to public resources that compound existing socioeconomic inequalities across race, ethnicity, gender, and level of education. I plan to secure additional  external funding to expand this research project into a global comparative study of how variations in  food supply chains and public health governance during the COVID-19 pandemic articulate with different race/ethnic dynamics and health outcomes among food sector workers, beginning with a  comparison between the US and China. The book I published and the establishment of research  collaborations with substantial external funding exemplify my resilience in face of challenges, and my  ability to thrive as a scholar even during a major crisis. 

In parallel, I am continuing to develop my long-term research on Food Safety and  Environmental Justice in China, the title of my second book project, and I have been invited by  the editor of the series “Elements on Global Development Studies” at the Cambridge University Press  to submit the book for their consideration. This manuscript, based upon my doctoral research, develops a 7-year ethnography of two villages in China. One is located in the central province of  Henan, where Han ethnic majority peasants are mainly organized in a male-led cooperative that  prioritized scaling-up commercial operations while sacrificing organic food production and  agroecological methods. The other is located in the southern province of Guangxi, where the majority  of the population are Zhuang and Yao indigenous ethnic minorities, and where a female-led  cooperative has prioritized instead the maintenance of heirloom seeds and organic food for local  markets at the cost of limiting their scale of production and commercialization. Both cooperatives  adopted these projects to cope with the ongoing food safety and environmental crisis in China, yet  the differences in terms of gender and ethnicity between them reveals powerful articulations with their  strategies for climate change resilience and adaptation, environmental justice and health governance.  I have already published articles related to this research project in Agriculture & Human Values (discussing gender, agency, and food sovereignty in China), the Canadian Journal of Development Studies (where I employ Karl Polanyi’s theory of the double-movement to examine bottom-up responses to  China’s food safety crisis), Development (on China and the UN Food System Summit), and an invited book chapter on “The political ecology of maize in China”.  

My comparative ethnography of Han majority and Zhuang/Yao indigenous ethnic minority  communities enables me to bring issues of ethnicity/race and indigeneity into focus alongside class  and gender, which is quite innovative for scholarship on China where ethnic studies are incipient. My  contributions to the study of race/ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, food, and health are also  evident in two invited general audience-oriented publications in the China Dialogue (in English and  Chinese) making “A feminist critique of the term ‘left behind’ women,” and a dialogue on “‘Food  Fusion’, Exchange or Appropriation?” in Latitude: Rethinking Power Relations for a Decolonized and Non Racial World, an English and German language publication by the Goethe Institute. Moreover, I discuss  daily life struggles for food sovereignty, indigenous identity, and feminism as “quiet social  movements” in China and other post-socialist societies marked by authoritarian states. This argument  is evident in several presentations I have given at academic events in the US, China, Russia, and Brazil,  and in Chinese-language publications such as my invited chapter on “Global feminist discourses  during the 1960s: A critical comparison of China, Brazil, France, and the United States,” in the edited  volume Global Studies Review. I intend to continue publishing in Chinese and to translate my book into  other languages, in order to continue engaging with scholarship from the Global South in collaborative  efforts to decenter the Euro-American academy, and advance theories and struggles from the South.