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.