We engage with a number of research projects, scholars, and practitioners working on infrastructure, the environment, and global China. If you would like to discuss possible collaborations, please get in touch!
China Made
中国制造 (CU Boulder)
Over the past decade, China has invested tremendously in infrastructure development, resulting in dramatic social and cultural changes in both rural and urban regions. It has also promoted an infrastructural development model beyond its borders as part of a newly aggressive foreign policy. China Made will explore both of these domestic and international dimension of China’s infrastructure development. The project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, is also meant to shift the academic focus from broader geopolitical and international relations perspectives to a finer grained analysis of the infrastructures themselves and the on-the-ground social and cultural dimensions of their construction. China Made is a partnership between Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS).
Picture: Tengchong, China (Alessandro Rippa, 2016)
ROADWORK (University of Zurich)
‘ROADWORK: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders’ is a four-year research project (2018-2022) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and based at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. The project team will conduct ethnographic fieldwork along roads that have been designated as key links at the Sino-Inner Asian interface of the China-initiated Silk Road Economic Belt. Archival research and GIS analysis, two further research methods employed by the team, will help to identify social relations and temporalities that are difficult to capture through ethnography, but which nonetheless powerfully affect roads and travel in this region of Asia. The conceptual aim of the project is to propose a novel framework to theorize the social life of roads through a dialogue with the concepts of place and time, and to bring decay and maintenance to the centre of anthropological enquiry.
Picture: The Pamir Highway in Murghab, Tajikistan (Alessandro Rippa, 2017)
TRANSECT (Eberswalde University)
The junior research group TRANSECT (Agrarian Transformations and Social-Ecological Complexities: Local Bioeconomy Scenarios in Central and South Asia, 2019-2024) at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany, investigates the social-ecological effects and interdependencies of agrarian transformations and bioeconomy developments in Central and South Asia. Focusing on case studies in Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, which have been subjected to vast agricultural interventions in the past, the research also draws attention to the current and future growth of China’s bioeconomy sector and its repercussions for neighbouring countries.
Picture: Terraced fields in the Hunza valley, Pakistan (Alessandro Rippa, 2017)
Conquering (with) Concrete
Global construction companies impact our futures. Beyond the edifices and infrastructures they construct, they also fundamentally influence governmental development aid policies, or dislocate people to build a new dam, for example. Yet the role of these major global players and their persistent presence in different world regions has barely been reflected upon. This project uses German construction companies as a prism to address a wide spectrum of economic, political, environmental or cultural impacts in specific local contexts through case studies. The choice to investigate such entrenched power structures through German firms is triggered by an interest in the label 'Made in Germany' which was established in the late colonial period and remains an unquestioned marker of quality. The main research question is: how have architecture and infrastructure projects built by German companies conquered the world? The project not only seeks to critically analyse success stories, but also to interrogate moments of failure. Focusing on production cycles, a research team of the PI and three PhD candidates scrutinises global flows of capital, labour, know-how and construction materials such as concrete in different representative regions in the "Global South".
Picture: Flyover on Lagos Island (Monika Motylinska)
Cycles of Circulation
Cycles of Circulation creates ways of relating to and representing ecologies. We undertake interventions into how climate governance ‘sees’ the world, as creative research practices. The project examines historical, contemporary and speculative relationships of intersections between political ecology, science and technology studies, and art, design and media as knowledge practices. We are interested in the entangled metabolisms of beings and their environments, and in how ‘cycles’ are used and abused in ecological, technological and political histories and communications. What are the results of these, in public imaginaries and policy? Amongst other related topics, the project engages with Chinese institutions and globalising initiatives such as the Belt and Road and the emerging China-led carbon economy. How does China’s recent environmental turn, with its reassertion of ‘traditional Chinese values’, meet and modulate modern conceptions of technics, planetarity and nature?