Faculty and scholars associated with Duke University, Jeju National University, and Duke Kunshan University who will participate in the 2024 Jeju Workshop are listed on this page. Click on a name or image to learn more about them as well as their current research projects and interests.
Jieun Cho Postdoctoral Associate, APSI, Duke University
Jieun Cho is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, specializing in gender, environment, and health. Her research (“Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan”) investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.
Various stages of her dissertation research have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate School at Duke University. Since 2021, she has also been a Contributing Editor of the Society for East Asian Anthropology section at Anthropology News.
As a postdoctoral researcher, she seeks to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on social reproduction, toxic ecologies, and environmental futures from the perspective of post-Cold War East Asia. Her research interests include: feminist care ethics, precarity and affect, gender and nation, anthropology of senses, place-making, disaster and crisis, and the Anthropocene.
Title:
Microchipped Companionship: Exploring a Commons Approach to Japan’s Stray Pet Crisis
Description:
This presentation explores the analytic potential of the “commons” framework in understanding the dynamics that shape human-animal companionship, focusing on the recent introduction of mandatory microchipping for controlling animal populations in Japan. In Japan, contact-based control, which is premised on mass breeding and killing of animals, has contributed to the “stray pet crisis,” earning the country notoriety for its high rates of euthanasia of abandoned animals. The government attempts to mitigate this situation by microchipping “pets” (dogs and cats) into the family registry system. Outlining the legal, social, and technological ecologies of stray pets, this talk examines how the notion of commons may be helpful in developing a responsible approach towards multispecies habitation amidst shifting landscapes.
Title:
Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan
Description:
What makes a meaningful life in a compromised environment? My project explores this question by investigating how child-raising families in irradiated towns strive to raise “healthy” children and recalibrate their lives through care work in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Foregrounding radiation as a condition of everyday living, it demonstrates how familial and social experiments with caring for “Fukushima children” reconfigure the reproductivity of “life” at the intersections of science-informed politics, risk-laden landscapes, and national kinship imaginaries. Ultimately, the project argues that everyday care work has potential to create new possibilities of planetary and political life, when end-time imaginaries threaten our capacity to envision the future of life otherwise in and beyond Japan.
Jieun Chominimize profilePostdoctoral Associate, APSI, Duke University
Seung Hee Cho Research Professor, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, Jeju National University
As an STS researcher and ethnographer, I am interested in cultural and political analyses of infrastructures and how those aspects relate to policy. Having a particular interest on renewable energies, the title of my dissertation project is “Testing a Carbon-Free Future: Sociotechnical experiments in renewable energy on Jeju island.” Based on science and technology studies (STS) and ethnographic field research, I am eager to know how Jeju, the biggest island in Korea, is becoming a testing place for green energy futures. I was inspired by Jeju’s political histories and natural environments, which had deep relations with the Island’s technological projects and future visions. The aim of my research is to connect technological experiments with political and ecological histories of the testing site.
Title:
The carbon-free exhibit: Experimentations with electric vehicles on Jeju Island
Description:
In Jeju, the largest island in South Korea, an experimental policy named “Carbon-Free Island” is underway. Since 2012, the Jeju Provincial Office has been aiming to cut down all carbon emissions on the island to zero until 2030. To make this happen, Jeju is promoting electric vehicles (EVs). The EV is one of Jeju’s Carbon-Free plan’s most heavily funded items. The Jeju local government has given public incentives to residents willing to purchase and own EVs. The government has also been popularizing EVs through annual expos, magazines, and the phrase, “Jeju, the Mecca of EVs.” Jeju’s carbon-free plan focused on making Jeju a “test bed” of green futures with low-carbon vehicles rather than the wellness of drivers. Here, “test bed” refers to places that serve as experimental sites to see whether a local society can attune to new technologies and infrastructures and achieve a sustainable future.
In this project, I suggest that sustainable futures require experiments. Focusing on Jeju’s electric vehicles, I suggest “exhibition” as a central practice of sociotechnical experiments. Although such experimental sites for innovation seem to be producing promising results, the ultimate goal of test beds is not completing a futuristic mission to 100 percent but instead demonstrating that a particular future is possible. Through ethnographic fieldwork research in Jeju Island, I investigated three different scenes of exhibition: promotions of EVs at a local expo, research demonstrations in a science park on Jeju’s tourist grounds, and the Jeju drivers’ everyday adjustments to carbon-free vehicles. Ultimately, I argue that exhibition is a central practice of practicing futuristic technology.
Seung Hee Chominimize profileResearch Professor, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, Jeju National University
Hyun Choe Professor of Sociology; Director, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, Jeju National University
Hyun Choe is a professor at the Department of Sociology and director of the Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society. He teaches political and cultural sociology. His research focuses on environmental citizenship and sustainable human development. He has published many articles and books, including Jeju as an Island of Commons, Vol. I and II (co-authored), Contested Citizenship in East Asia (co-authored) and Citizenship (authored).
Hyun Choeminimize profileProfessor of Sociology; Director, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, Jeju National University
Chi Yeung (Jimmy) Choi Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Duke Kunshan University
Chi-Yeung (Jimmy) Choi is an applied ecologist with expertise in animal ecology, conservation biology, wetland ecology and environmental management. He studies the relationship between animals and their environment.
Current study systems include the ecology of migratory birds, with a focus on their foraging and movement ecology within and between coastal intertidal wetlands. This requires extensive fieldwork in many places ranging from Alaska and East Asia to Australia and New Zealand. The work has led to investigations of diet, habitat use, local movement, population dynamics as well as migration phenology and strategies, often using the latest technology in wildlife tracking and remote sensing.
Based on the findings from these studies, long-term habitat quality monitoring, protected area boundary adjustment and integrated natural and artificial management are proposed to improve the habitats for migratory waterbirds. These efforts not only contribute to nature conservation, but also to the restoration of wetland ecosystems on which humans depend.
Title:
The invisible connection – how migratory birds connect people along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway
Description:
Hundreds and thousands of migratory birds travel tirelessly along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway annually, with some of them covering a distance of more than 29,000 km a year, passing through countries like South Korea and China to reach their breeding and wintering destinations. In this presentation, I will introduce the remarkable journeys that migratory waterbirds in our region undertake, the challenges that they face, what we can do to help the birds overcome those challenges, and how they have connected people along the route for the research and conservation of migratory birds and their wetland habitats.
Chi Yeung (Jimmy) Choiminimize profileAssistant Professor of Environmental Science, Duke Kunshan University
Juliette Duara Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke Law School
Juliette Duara is a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University School of Law. Her research interests include investigating the viability of human rights as an ethical system for the 21st century. This project necessarily involves investigating the framing and implementation of humans’ essential rights to a healthy environment, as well as pushing the boundaries of the rights framework to include justiciable rights for the non-human, from animals to environments.
Her publications include a book entitled Gender Justice and Proportionality in India: Comparative Perspectives, published by Routledge in 2018 as part of its “Advances in South Asian Studies” series and an article on “Religious Pluralism, Personal Laws and Gender Equality in Asia: Their History of Conflict and the Prospects for Accommodation” in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (2012). She has a BA in History from Whitman College, an MA in Asian Studies from Stanford, a JD from the University of Chicago Law School, and a PhD in Law from the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law.
Title:
Considering a ‘Rights of Nature’ Approach to Environmental Preservation and Restoration in Asia
Description:
For many humans the realization that our species are ensnared in the anthropogenic plundering of nature has come belatedly. Efforts to save Earth from the pollutants humans have released into the water and air and other anthropogenic activities are multitudinous. In this presentation I discuss but one, the Rights of Nature Movement (RoN). I assert that when it comes to Earth and the environment, human rights face a paradox. Human rights, a set of anthropocentric legal concepts, cannot be achieved without recognizing that other beings and ecosystems have rights independent of their utility to humans. This re-conceptualization of rights combines the international human rights framework with the cosmologies at the heart of many indigenous communities which recognize that nature and natural entities have moral importance deserving of respect and protection. Building on Christopher Stone’s 1972 article, “Should Trees Have Standing? – Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”, as well as subsequent writings by both Stone and other authors, I briefly summarize what it would mean for nature to have rights and give examples of states that have moved toward recognizing nature’s rights within their legal systems. These states include Ecuador, some states within India, and New Zealand. I conclude that RoN is for much of humanity a vital reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and nature, as well as an essential instrument in the neoliberal, legalistic world which most of us inhabit.
Juliette Duaraminimize profileSenior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke Law School
Prasenjit Duara Oscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies, History; Director, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute
Prasenjit Duara was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015).
In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.
He has a strong interest in environmental humanities and has organized a conference on environmental justice and sustainable citizenship in Asia, as well as workshops on the hydrologic cycle and historical societies, rivers and historical time, rivers in the Anthropocene, the management of water power in post-war East Asia, and trans-species listening and the rights of nature.
Title:
Lives and Histories in the Hydrosphere of Monsoon Asia
Description:
This volume, which I am editing, delves into the pervasive aqueousness as a condition of human activity—whether as snow, rain, mud or humidity. From exploring the interconnectedness of individual bodies to aquatic ecosystems to examining the far-reaching impact of the ocean on land, we seek to foreground the waterscape as equally important to humanistic studies as terrestrial and structural landscapes where the pervasiveness of water is often less visible.
Title:
Impact of Mega Water Projects on Local Ecosystems along the Mekong River
Description:
How do colossal dams and other large-scale water and deforestation projects affect local ecosystems and particularly local knowledge along the Mekong River. The financialization by global investment companies of these projects produces new forms of risk and uncertainties that reverberate from local communities to global scales, posing challenges that extend beyond individual regions to planetary implications.
Prasenjit Duaraminimize profileOscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies, History; Director, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute
Wumeng He Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics, Duke Kunshan University
He’s research explores the interactions between human behaviors, government policy and the environment in the context of developing countries, with special interests in land use, conservation, natural resource management and rural development.
Trained as an economist with a strong interdisciplinary background, he is particularly interested in incorporating economic thinking with non-economic methodology. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan University include environmental and resource economics, environmental policy analysis and the statistics of program evaluation. He has a BA in environmental studies from Brown University, an MA in economics from New York University and a PhD in environmental policy from Duke University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was assistant professor at Wuhan University.
Title:
A Tale of Two Lakes: The Cultural Value of Natural Landscape
Description:
How cultural values of natural landscape are created? By examining two cases in China, the West Lake of Hangzhou and the East Lake of Wuhan, I explore how cultural value could become a dominant reason for natural preservation and how Chinese were deliberately constructing cultural values in history and in present. It reflects the Chinese traditional view of nature’s value that emphasizes the presence of human activity and how people can embed personal legacy in natural landscape. This offers a new perspective on natural conservation effort today.
Wumeng Heminimize profileAssistant Professor of Environmental Economics, Duke Kunshan University
Binbin Li Assistant Professor, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University; Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Duke Kunshan University
Binbin Li is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences of the Environmental Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. She holds a secondary appointment with Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Her research focuses on loss of biodiversity, endangered and endemic species conservation such as giant pandas, priority setting and management of protected areas, and promotion of innovative technology, markets and policies to solve conservation problems and local community development. She earned her PhD in Environment from Duke University (2017), MS in Natural Resources and Environment from University of Michigan (2012) and BS in Life Sciences with a dual degree in Economics from Peking University (2010).
Her work covers the identification of conservation priorities and national parks in China, impacts of One Belt One Road on biodiversity, giant panda conservation and management via Footprint Identification Technique (FIT), impacts of oil palm and rubber plantations on biodiversity in Southeast Asia, influence of national environmental policies on human-wildlife conflicts, and behavioral study of endemic species. She is also a member of the IUCN SSC Small Mammal Specialist Group. She is engaged in science communication and nature education and is a signed nature photographer at Swild in China.
From 2013 to 2015, she served as a science advisor for the Disney nature documentary “Born in China.” She is devoted to using photography, social media, drama, and other art formats to promote conservation science in the public.
Title:
What’s under the forest? The understanding of livestock grazing and tea plantation in the forest ecosystem
Description:
Biodiversity and cultural diversity often coincide geographically, notably in regions that are also faced with socioeconomic disparities. The conundrum of reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with the imperative for local socioeconomic advancement is not only pressing but multifaceted in nature. In this context, I delve into two livelihood practices prevalent among minority communities in the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan, China: the traditional free-ranging of livestock and the cultivation of ancient tea gardens beneath forest canopies. This inquiry seeks to elucidate the repercussions of unregulated livestock grazing on the habitats of the giant panda and to identify the catalysts behind the proliferation of livestock within these forested domains. Furthermore, this examination extends to devising sustainable livestock management strategies that synergize with community involvement within these biodiversity hotspots. Turning to the domain of tea cultivation, I aim to dissect the potential for fostering conservation-compatible tea production in Yunnan’s tropical region. Within this landscape exists a tapestry of tea production methodologies, ranging from the modest, minority-operated ancient forest teas to expansive, commercialized terraced tea plantations. A paradigm shift from terraced to forest-based tea cultivation has the dual potential to facilitate forest restoration and create ecological corridors. Nevertheless, this transition is not devoid of pitfalls. The forthcoming discourse aims to unfurl the complexities and tease out the inherent challenges of these endeavors.
Binbin Liminimize profileAssistant Professor, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University; Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Duke Kunshan University
Edmund Malesky Professor of Policital Science; Director, Duke Center for International Development, Duke University)
Edmund (Eddy) Malesky is a specialist on Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Currently, Malesky’s research agenda is very much at the intersection of Comparative and International Political Economy, falling into three major categories: 1) Authoritarian political institutions and their consequences; 2) The political influence of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations; and 3) Political institutions, private business development, and formalization.
His research projects on environmental governance include “Boycotts or Bureaucracy: Who Has the Power to Make Vietnam Greener?” and “Can an Accountability App Solve the Waste Crisis in Cambodia?”
Title:
The Provincial Green Index: Measuring Economic Governance and its Impact in Vietnam
Description:
The PGI was initiated by VCCI, USAID and private partners to assess the importance of environmental protection in Vietnam’s growth trajectory and has been developed over the past five years. The PGI aggregates the perception of businesses into a common voice to communicate their views on environmental policy to national and local decision-makers. A province that performs well on the PGI is one that makes an effort to combat pollution and environmental accidents (subindex 1), designs and implements reasonable regulations that ensure compliance without creating overwhelming burdens (subindex 2), provides appropriate guidance to firms on green operations and operates environmentally friendly procurement (subindex 3), and incentivizes green operations through targeted incentives and subsidy programs (subindex 4). The goal of the PGI is to provide actionable policy advice to national and subnational officials about the appropriate policy goals to reduce the impact of climate change and pollution on business performance and longevity. Statistical analysis demonstrates that excellence in these measures is associated with less pollution and greater climate resilience. Provinces, that have shown improvements in PGI measures, have experienced measurable changes in exposure to measurable pollutants. A ten-point improvement in the PGI is associated with a twenty-five percentage point decline of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere and an eight percentage point decline in nitrogen dioxide in the troposphere.
Edmund Maleskyminimize profileProfessor of Policital Science; Director, Duke Center for International Development, Duke University
Margaret McKean Research Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
Professor McKean studies political institutions, particularly electoral arrangements and property rights, and is interested in applying theories of cooperation to the management of common-pool goods like environmental resources. Her other work on the commons has examined traditional arrangements used in Japan to foster cooperation in limiting use to sustainable levels.
Beyond Japan, she is interested in diagnosing not just how but also why people use joint arrangements to manage collective goods, and in extracting lessons from the existing repertoire of experience with environmental cooperation and common-property regimes to inform efforts to address common-pool resource problems in contemporary settings, on more complex collective goods, and at larger scales.
She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Common Property from 1982 to 1987 where she helped to organize the Annapolis conference on Common Property (1985) and to build the initial Common Property network. Along with Elinor Ostrom, Fikret Berkes, David Feeny, and others, McKean co-founded the International Association for the Study of Common Property in 1989. She organized the first global meeting of the IASCP at Duke in 1990 as well as the recent global conference of IASC held on the Mount Fuji commons in Japan in 2013. She also served as fifth president of the IASCP (1995-1996).
She is currently working on three book-length manuscripts: Cooperation on the Japanese Commons; The Common Good in Uncommonly Bad Times: Japan’s Experience with Collective Choice under Scarcity; and Property Rights for a Small Planet. She is also involved with European and Japanese colleagues in several collaborative projects.
Margaret McKeanminimize profileResearch Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
Young-Gyung Paik Professor of Sociology, Jeju National University
As a professor of sociology at Jeju National University, Young-Gyung Paik’s areas of research extend to cultural anthropology, women’s studies, and science and technology. Becoming a co-researcher at the Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society opened Professor Paik’s eyes to the problems of the commons. She is interested in exploring the potential roles commoning can play in various areas of life, including medicine and welfare, heritage, and education. She is also researching how the perspectives of native studies and feminism can contribute to the commons discourse on climate change and post-growth issues.
Her journal articles published to date include “The Commons and Welfare: Toward a Synthetic Approach to the Crises of Social Reproduction,” “The Taiwanese Indigenous Land Rights Movement and the Changing Relationship of Community and Commons,” and “The Meanings of Heritage and Communal Life: A Case Study of a Jeju Village.”
Title:
The Multiple Crises of Ecology, Care, and Population in South Korea and the Prospective of the Commons
Description:
The objective of this study is to reveal the paradoxical necessity of expanding the commons perspective into social protection, care, and welfare instead of limiting the commons discourse, as is done today, to the management of natural resources only. Commons are most commonly and naturally understood as physical resources, whether natural or manmade, like land, water, forests, and spaces, whose use “should remain open to all potential users according to social norms” and which, “when overused by users, diminish in quantity and quality for other users”. Commons thinking and the specific discussions it has spawned, however, inspire people with their solidarity- and sharing-based principles that may be applied as much to social relations as to material resources. Commons thinking, in fact, plays a significant role in a variety of movements worldwide that arise in resistance against the neoliberal violation of welfare and against the collusion of the market and the state to invade people’s daily lives. Participants of these movements look to common thinking to find inspiration for alternative and better ways of life. Despite this phenomenon, little systematic analysis has yet been done on how the commons can answer the crisis of social reproduction and the attendant problems, such as the crisis of care and the demographic cliff.
Young-Gyung Paikminimize profileProfessor of Sociology, Jeju National University
Suh-Hyun Park Research Professor, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, Jeju National University
Suh-Hyun Park, a research professor at the Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, majored in philosophy at Korea University and obtained his doctorate in philosophy at Seoul National University. He has been researching the commons from an Autonomist-Marxist perspective.
He is a co-translator of Reflection on Empire by Antonio Negri, while his journal articles include “Alternative Production of Knowledge Commons in Korean Academic Society” and “Alternative Sharing of Knowledge Commons in Korean Academic Society.”
Title:
Social Movements and the Commons
Description:
How do movements like the 1999 Seattle struggle against neoliberal globalization and the 2008 Occupy Wall Street movement relate to the commons? These movements featured solidarity based on mutual trust between occupiers, the management of space through autonomous and democratic decision-making, and other aspects. They were without representation in the interest of creating more autonomous social relationships in the sense that participants did not delegate their power to others. Is it therefore possible to understand these movements as parts of the commons movements? Although temporary, the Seattle and Occupy Wall Street movements show us there is a way of life that is not based on private ownership or possessive individualism that neoliberalism increasingly intensifies. In this sense, such commons movements can be understood as critical experiments in questioning the current system and exploring alternatives to it.
Suh-Hyun Parkminimize profileResearch Professor, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society, Jeju National University
Youngpyo Seo Professor of Sociology, Jeju National University
Youngpyo Seo is a professor of sociology at Jeju National University. His research interests include environmental sociology, sociological theory, political sociology, as well as urban sociology.
He graduated from Seoul National University’s Department of Korean History prior to earning a master’s degree in sociology at SNU. He later completed a master’s degree and PhD in sociology at the University of Essex.
Title:
A New Paradigm of Knowledge in the Era of Climate Crisis: Towards Non-Reductionist Naturalism as Human Capacity
Description:
Many voices in the broad perspective named new materialism have been galvanizing new thinking beyond human exceptionalism. It has been suggested that things such as non-human species should be regarded as agents or actants. The key idea is the hybridity of all beings in the world. Donna Haraway and the late Bruno Latour are the well-known protagonists in this new ontological turn. While their idea of hybridity and interdependence are welcome, there are some questions to be solved.
My question is epistemological: the worldview of hybridity is normatively good and, as they argued, all beings on our planet are intermingled in the web of life, but the beings that recognize and define the hybridity are human beings. In this context, the epistemological question is fundamentally political. Despite being aware of the complexity of life at the normative level, all of us are caught within the ideology of developmentalism and productionism. We must change our way of living and thinking. There must be political interventions in terms of human experiences of suffering and vulnerability. At the same time, the political practices are the learning processes that result from cultural and historical capacities of humans.
In order to connect the ontological and normative ideas to epistemological and political questions, first of all, we have to focus on the social formation called capitalism, and then on how it has been threatening our life as natural beings. It is a naturalistic critique of capitalism resonant with new materialism. As I mentioned, however, we, natural beings are interrelated with nature as our inorganic body politically changes our institutional or structural conditions, which is dependent on our cultural and political capacities. The latter is never given naturally, but must be politically and culturally achieved by us as social beings. It can be coined as non-reductionist naturalism following Ted Benton’s The Natural Relations, and broad ecological thinking based on critical realism.
Matthew Shutzer Assistant Professor of History, Duke University
Matthew Shutzer is an environmental historian of South Asia and the post-colonial world, with research and teaching interests in science and technology studies, global development, empire and decolonization, critical approaches to property and the commons, and the history of capitalism broadly construed.
He is completing a book-length project on India and the global history of fossil fuels from the nineteenth century to the present, thematizing the intersections between carbon energy, global inequality, and the planetary crisis of climate change.
Before joining Duke in 2023, he was a Junior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Title:
Subterranean Property: Nature, Capital, and the Rise of Fossil Fuels in India and the World
Description:
Contemporary accounts of the climate crisis locate its origins in the global production and consumption of fossil fuels, the primary cause of unsustainable carbon emissions that threaten to destroy the biosphere and life on this planet. This production-centered focus has generated many different strands of ecological thinking in recent years, stimulated in particular by ideas of “degrowth” and “decarbonization” as ways of both reducing the global throughput of fossil energy or transitioning the global energy system towards renewable energy technologies like solar and wind, respectively. In my first book, I try to tell a different story about the globalization of fossil fuels and its consequences. By decentering narratives of production and growth, my work instead focuses on conflicts over the rise of “subterranean property”—the legal and normative basis by which fossil fuel natures have become objects of private wealth and value since the nineteenth century. This category of property has had far-reaching implications for determining the structure of the global fossil economy, often in ways that supersede the imperatives of productive or industrial infrastructures and growth-oriented economic policies. Focusing on property returns the environmental history of climate change to considerations of the legal and social structures that shape human orientations to nature—a form of critique that seeks ultimately new means by which more-than-human natures can be valued otherwise.
Matthew Shutzerminimize profileAssistant Professor of History, Duke University
Sun-Jin Yun Professor of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University
After majoring in sociology at Seoul National University (SNU) as an undergraduate, Professor Sun-Jin Yun went on to obtain her master’s degree in urban affairs and public policy, and doctorate in environmental and energy policy, at the University of Delaware. A former chairperson of the Korean Association for Environmental Sociology, Professor Yun is now serving as a Co-chairperson of 2050 Carbon Neutrality Commission. She also heads the Research Center for the Development of Innovative Workforces for Sustainable Cities in an Era of Great Transition, a stage-4 project supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s BK21-Plus Program.
Professor Yun’s areas of research include the political economy of the environment and energy, environmental sociology, environmental education, agrarian sociology, and environmental and energy policy. Her major works have addressed such topics as social perceptions, policies, and movements concerning climate change, nuclear energy, and renewable energy, as well as sustainable management of the commons.
She has published 13 books in English to date as a co-author, including Environmental Movements in Korea: A Sourcebook and Energy Transition in East Asia: A Social Science Perspective. Her 38 books published in Korea include Green Transition: Values and Strategy for a Sustainable Eco Society and Mekong Delta Development: Dilemma and Governance of Environmental Cooperation. She has also co-authored/co-translated three books, in addition to authoring/co-authoring over 160 journal articles, written originally in either Korean or English, including “Building energy democracy to mend ecological and epistemic rifts.”
Sun-Jin Yunminimize profileProfessor of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University
