work:
I am a graduate student in the Department
of Sociology and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at The University
of Wisconsin. I earned an MS in Natural Resources Policy & Behavior
at The
School of Natural Resources and the Environment at The
University of Michigan.
I am an environmental sociologist concerned with rural development and environmental policy in China. Environmental sociology is about how humans make and are made by the biophysical worlds we inhabit. Development refers to endeavors to foster activities and build structures intended to enhance people's capacities to live gratifying lives. Development often involves remaking environments or ways people relate with their environments. Some things we do when pursuing development cause environmental damage, and others mitigate or even reverse it; our cultures and perspectives affect how we think about and relate with nature; and groups of people vie for access to and control over natural resources. Environments shape possibilities for social life; water and land resources shape what we subsist on; the spatial distribution of resources shapes social organization and economic activity. In my work I try to help people understand these relationships and think about ways we might wish to change or maintain them.
These strands come together in my research on nature reserves and national parks and a growing tourism industry in China's southwestern periphery, an area that has only lately come to enjoy the material benefits of the country's boom. I am asking questions like these: Whose ideas end up in the rules and laws that are drawn up, what are the impacts on conservation practices and residents' daily lives, and how do these different people work with and against one another to bring national parks about? For more academic information, see my research page.
movement i:
I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but most of my childhood
took place in the northern Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. I went to college
in Nashville (Vanderbilt University; BA, Sociology & East Asian Studies), lived in Chicago
for a year after that, then a year in Nanjing (Hopkins-Nanjing
Center), and two in Ann Arbor (University of Michigan; MS, Natural Resources: Policy and Behavior). Somehow sociology
of environment and development in China have led me back, of all places, to
my mother's hometown of Madison, Wisconsin.
movement ii:
I have been learning Mandarin Chinese since 1999 and have had the
good fortune to visit that country on a number of occasions for
study,
research, and recreation. Within China, I have lived for extended periods of
time in Beijing, Harbin, Weihai, Nanjing, and Nanchang, Kunming, and northwest Yunnan, where I am learning about how all sorts of
different people are setting up new generation of national parks with goals
like preserving fabulous
tracts of
nature while
bringing
cash,
machinery,
and paying tourists to these places.
updated 9 August 2011