Introduction

I joined CUHK after working as an assistant professor of anthropology at DePauw University (2020-2024) and completing postdoctoral fellowships at George Washington (2019-2020) and Stanford (2018-2019). I am currently working on a book project that is a culmination of over a decade of research focused on scrap making and trading in China, titled Uncontained: Scrap Worlds in and Beyond China. The book offers a political anthropology of structurally aligned discards that extend beyond the political borders of China, including objects, bodies, and places. It does so largely through an ethnographic account centering the lives of informal waste workers—a subset of the rural migrant population that faces political, economic, and cultural marginalization. Based on over two years of fieldwork in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, I trace disjunctions between scrap traders and state-backed projects that seek to bring western-style recycling systems, aesthetics, and ethics to China. A key argument of the book builds on this disjunction—that recycling “the right way” is an impossibility within late capitalism’s regime of disposability, and that recycling as an imagined citizen-state partnership benefiting an abstract environment only appears to work in situations where the polluting and inefficient industrial processing of recycling occurs elsewhere. In recent decades these “elsewheres” have largely been in China and Asia more broadly, which has deeply shaped global imaginaries of urban environmental modernity.

Research interests

environmental, political, economic, visual, public, and community-engaged anthropology; discard studies; junk art; the environmental humanities; and Chinese, Asian, and American studies.

Selected publications

2024        “Global producer responsibility for plastic pollution” Science Advances 10(17), eadj8275. Cowger et al (large team collaborative effort).

2023        “High-metabolism infrastructure and the scrap industry in urban China” China Quarterly 255, 560-574. **Recipient of Gordon White Prize for the most original article in CQ 2023**

2023        “Harnessing the stenches of waste: Human bodies as environmental sensors in contemporary China” in Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats, Penn St. Press, 194-213.    

2021        “Waste politics in Asia and global repercussions” Education About Asia 26(1), 35-40.

2021        “Garbage bins are for containing people too” in Cultural China 2021: The Contemporary China Centre Review, U of Westminster P, 32-36.

2020        “Garbage as value and sorting as labor in China’s new waste policy” Made in China Journal 5(1), 56-64. Co-authored with Goeun Lee.

2019        “Reconfiguring Chinese natures: frugality and waste reutilization in Mao era urban China” Critical Asian Studies 51(4), 537-557.

2018        “No more of your junk” The New Internationalist 516, 24-26.

2018        “Plastic China: Sorting plastic, sorting people” Toxic News 2018/11/01.