The Durham Workshop Presenters

Title: Fire Play: Communicating Indigenous Fire Governance in Indonesia

Description:

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, Thailand has emerged as a frontrunner in implementing renewable energy policies and practices. Signal among its efforts has been investment in a wide range of energy technologies from wind and solar to less conventional bioenergy that makes strategic use of the country’s dominating agricultural sector.

The saga demonstrates many of the dilemmas in decentralized climate policy and international carbon offsetting. Chief among these is the labyrinth of unknowns concerning the linkages between state and corporation in Thailand and the integrity of the carbon reductions.

Title: Fostering Biodiversity Conservation: An Educational Approach

Description:

International and interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial for addressing global environmental challenges. Joint – venture universities, with their diverse student and faculty bodies, are ideal for nurturing future environmental leaders.

By combining theoretical knowledge with practical experience, students are better equipped to influence environmental decision – making. Our approach creates environmentally conscious individuals who can drive conservation efforts, whether in policy – making, on – the – ground projects, or public outreach. This holistic educational model helps to build a more sustainable future, promoting effective environmental governance at local, regional, and potentially global levels.

Title:

Earth Jurisprudence: Teaching on the Rights of Nature through New Zealand’s Experience Using AI

Description:

At the Environmental Futures in Asia Workshop last year on Jeju Island, I made a presentation on the rights of nature that focused on discussing Christopher Stone’s seminal article, “Should Trees Have Standing?”. This year I propose to build on this exploration into the rights of nature as an aspect of “earth jurisprudence”, a legal philosophy that advocates greater congruity between human systems and the needs and rhythms of the natural world. In keeping with this year’s emphasis on pedagogy, my presentation will feature ways of harnessing AI in the teaching of both content and critique. The content will consist of a case study of New Zealand’s recognition of the legal personhood of several Mauri sacred spaces: the Whanganui River, the Te Urewera Forest, and Mount Taranaki. Methodologies for teaching critical thinking will focus on resources for analyzing and verifying what AI has to offer when it is prompted to discuss the rights of nature in the New Zealand context.

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.

Title:

Gardening Community: Relational Agriculture and the Southeast Asian Diaspora in the US South

Description:

For over a decade at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the Carolina Community Garden has provided a space for students to learn about low-input agriculture and for volunteers to grow vegetables, produce food, and feed hungry people. This paper documents an innovative program led by the garden to donate food to underpaid sanititation workers, most of whom are Karen refugees from Burma/Myanmar. The program has led gardeners to shift cultivars to serve the tastes of this growing Asian-American community in Orange County, NC, growing a larger community in the process. It has also raised complex ethical questions—about, for example, how to raise living standards for marginalized workers short of salary increases—that we answer herein. How does food provision figure in the relationship between a large institution and precarious workers, especially refugees who are part of a growing a Southeast Asian diaspora? Although food provision benefits a neoliberal institution, we find that it does not necessarily keep wages low because the time saved by workers enables them to organize. Drawing on an idea of relational agriculture, we argue that food in this context nurtures community and generates a source of meaning and communal connection.

Title:

Integrating and Teaching with Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change

Description:

Through research within and among Tibetan communities in Southwest China and indigenous Atayal in Taiwan, a prevalent theme I have encountered among indigenous communities in Asia is that they do not experience, perceive, or react to climate change in the same manner as Western conservation science or through the same rhetoric as the dominant ethnic groups within their territories. This work discusses my ongoing work to enhance indigenous worldviews in teaching about climate change. Indigenous minority ecologies and world views in China and Taiwan are incredibly rich in terms of informing and contributing to our understandings of contemporary global climate change. These groups perceive climate change impacts and relate them to socio-political failings among the dominant Han Chinese states in mainland China and Taiwan. Climate change impacts such as glacier retreat in Tibet are viewed as a local agentive response among mountain deity cults to increasing pollution from government promoted chemically intensive forms of commercial agriculture. The Atayal in Taiwan similarly view themselves and the landscape around them as one contiguous ecosystem under a sacred set of laws called gaga, in which animals, water bodies, forests, etc. all possess agency incorporated into environmental decision making. Under global climate change which has caused issues including more severe typhoons, landslides, and extinction of animal species important to the Atayal, it is not climate change itself which causes these issues which the Atayal argue have always been existent, but rather an increase in deforestation, relocation of mountain communities, and other state driven changes.

Title:

Experiential Learning in Climate Change Economics and Policy

Description:

This presentation explores innovative pedagogical approaches to teaching environmental economics and policy in courses at Duke Kunshan University. I will highlight two key strategies designed to enhance student engagement and understanding of complex economic concepts and their real-world applications. First, I employ interactive games and simulations in the classroom to make abstract economic principles more accessible and to foster dynamic discussions. Second, I organize field trips to local sites near Kunshan, allowing students to observe and analyze policy implementations firsthand. These experiential learning methods bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, enriching students’ educational experiences. During the talk, I will share specific examples from my courses, present student feedback, and reflect on the outcomes of these approaches. Additionally, I will discuss insights gained from this teaching journey and outline future plans to further refine and expand these methods. This presentation aims to contribute to the broader conversation on effective pedagogy in climate change economics and policy education.

Title:

In the Bardo: Queer, Buddhism and Environmental Impermanence

Description:

This paper examines Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s engagement with Tibetan Buddhist thought as a framework for reimagining queer subjectivity, pedagogy, and environmental impermanence in the context of Tibet’s ecological and cultural transformations. Through close readings of Sedgwick’s “Pedagogy of Buddhism” in Touching Feeling and her archival materials from Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, I explore how Sedgwick’s reflections on nonduality and the bardo—the transitional state between life and death in Tibetan Buddhism—offer an alternative conceptual vocabulary for engaging with mortality, change, and ecological loss. Situating her work within broader critiques of Orientalism and Western appropriations of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, I examine how Buddhist-inflected queer theory contributes to environmental discourse in Tibet, where climate change, glacial melt, and shifting landscapes disrupt both ecosystems and traditional knowledge systems.Sedgwick’s fiber art extends these existential concerns into a material practice of embodiment and impermanence, paralleling Tibetan Buddhist ritual objects and sustainable craft traditions that reflect an ecological ethos of transience, relationality, and interdependence. I argue that her engagement with Buddhist thought opens space for pedagogical approaches that resist anthropocentric environmentalism, instead emphasizing non-attachment, cyclicality, and the interconnectedness of human and non-human worlds—key Buddhist principles that resonate with contemporary eco-philosophy in Tibet and East Asia. By bringing Sedgwick’s insights on Buddhism and queer theories into dialogue with Asian ecological ethics, this paper highlights how Buddhist-inflected queer methodologies offer conceptual resources for rethinking ecological grief, climate change, and sustainability. In doing so, I suggest that Tibetan Buddhist notions of impermanence and the bardo provide critical insights for navigating environmental uncertainty in Tibet and beyond.

Title:

Pedagogical Implications of Food Care at Hansalim Jeju Cooperative

Description:

This presentation explores the pedagogical implications of food care at the Hansalim Jeju Cooperative in Jeju, South Korea. In the current global food system, the economically disadvantaged and vulnerable have difficulty feeding themselves. Hansalim started “food care,” i.e., making food a commons through caring, to take care of those people.
Hansalim’s food care targets not only the economically disadvantaged but also the “food poor,” those who struggle to access food for a variety of reasons, including housing instability, lack of time or cooking skills, illness, immobility, cultural differences, and the like. Importantly, Hansalim’s food care is organized by local residents themselves. Through this engagement, residents have learned that there are vulnerable and food-poor people in their own neighborhoods, for whom they have practiced food care using local resources, such as local agricultural products.
One of these practices is “verb finding.” Locals participating in food care were asked to write verbs in blanks to create campaign phrases: “____ healthy food naturally and take care of each other.” The verbs could include share, make, deliver, eat, farm or others. Through practices described by these verbs, locals have transformed themselves into agents of food care. This presentation will identify the pedagogical implications of specific features of Hansalim’s food care.

Title:

Contested Wildness: Legal Inconsistencies and the Governance of Swiftlet Farming in Malaysia and Borneo

Description:

With the growing demand in China’s market, the supply chain of the edible bird’s nest (EBN) continues to expand. EBN, made the saliva of tropical swiftlets, has been considered a prized medicinal delicacy in Chinese food culture for centuries. My research focuses on Malaysia’s EBN industry, particularly the technological advancement of sound-driven birdhouses led by Chinese Malaysians and traditional cave nest harvesting practiced by Indigenous communities in the natural caves of Malaysian Borneo. While sound technology recruits wild swiftlets into the system of industrial production, its dissemination tends to undermine Indigenous livelihoods. Both modes of EBN production can cause ecological degradation due to over-harvesting or intensive farming. Yet the wildness/ domestication of swiftlets remains contested. In 2010, Malaysia’s federal government removed white-nest and black-nest swiftlets from the Wildlife Conservation Act (WCA), where they had been listed since 1998. However, Sarawak, with greater autonomy than West Malaysian states, still classifies both species as second-class protected wildlife, requiring permits for related activities. Moreover, swiftlets have never been listed under the WCA in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borno, despite sharing similar transboundary biodiversity with Malaysian Borneo. This case highlights inconsistencies in swiftlet governance among federal, state, and cross-country levels. This paper explores how swiftlets’ wildness/ domestication becomes a contested discourse and shapes the enforcement of WCA, how legal inconsistencies blur the (il)legality of swiftlet farming and protection across Malaysia and Borneo, and how these disparities may contribute to the environmental inequality within EBN-dependent communities.

Title:

Visceral Pedagogies for Indigeneity and Colonial Capitalism in the Climate Catastrophe

Description:

My research theorizes Asia through the lens of Indigeneity and colonial capitalism to foster new conversations, collaborations, and solidarities for global environmental futures. However, these discussions are often challenging, provoking defensive reactions, impasses, and feelings of guilt or hopelessness. In Asia, many resist viewing colonialism as a contemporary and ongoing process, framing it instead as a historical event and positioning the region as a victim, rather than a perpetrator. Meanwhile, progressive scholars in the Global North, concerned with anti-Asian racism, are sometimes hesitant to confront Asia’s role in perpetuating colonial capitalism. In this paper, I draw on my experiences as someone who grew up in Asia, studied in the West, and now teaches in an authoritarian context in Asia, to explore the role of emotions in shaping conversations about Asian and global environmental futures. I argue that engaging with emotions is central to decolonizing environmental education. Emotions and visceral experiences are double-edged: They can obscure analysis and reinforce existing social arrangements; but they can also open space for theorization and spark political action. Scholars and educators concerned with environmental futures must be attuned to this double-edged politics and develop both our own and our students’ capacity to engage with complex and contextually specific emotional and visceral reactions. This analysis contributes to conversations about the relationship between emotions and politics, offering broader insights for understanding politics and the role of transformative pedagogy in an era of climate catastrophe and rising authoritarianism globally

Title:

Chemical Cultures and Countercultures

Description:

Ui Jun, the Japanese engineer and environmental activist, asked the following questions of chemical industry and the environment in the 1970s: Why had kōgai (pollution) come, how should experts respond, and is there a sustainable path to industrial growth? More than merely observing that rapid industrialization was concomitant with chemical pollution, Ui highlighted the role of the scientist or engineer and their agency in effecting change.

This project develops a teaching module that employs historical scholarship to examine how scientists and technicians responded to what they took to be the most pressing problems in environmental management and thought during chemical industrialization across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the implications for society, focusing on Japan within a comparative Asian and global context. It builds a series of historical case studies for the module on the theme of food and agriculture. It aims to present the case studies in a manner that is accessible to a broad interdisciplinary community. It includes three topics: 1) the industrialization of food commodities, from soy sauce and sake to ramen and flavors; 2) the industrialization of agriculture and systems of fertilizers, pesticides, and waste management; 3) the rise of countercultural movements, such as Fukuoka Masanobu’s natural farming, in the decades following the Green Revolution.

Title:

Gardening Community: Relational Agriculture and the Southeast Asian Diaspora in the US South

Description:

For over a decade at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the Carolina Community Garden has provided a space for students to learn about low-input agriculture and for volunteers to grow vegetables, produce food, and feed hungry people. This paper documents an innovative program led by the garden to donate food to underpaid sanititation workers, most of whom are Karen refugees from Burma/Myanmar. The program has led gardeners to shift cultivars to serve the tastes of this growing Asian-American community in Orange County, NC, growing a larger community in the process. It has also raised complex ethical questions—about, for example, how to raise living standards for marginalized workers short of salary increases—that we answer herein. How does food provision figure in the relationship between a large institution and precarious workers, especially refugees who are part of a growing a Southeast Asian diaspora? Although food provision benefits a neoliberal institution, we find that it does not necessarily keep wages low because the time saved by workers enables them to organize. Drawing on an idea of relational agriculture, we argue that food in this context nurtures community and generates a source of meaning and communal connection.

Title: Fostering Biodiversity Conservation: An Educational Approach

Description:

International and interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial for addressing global environmental challenges. Joint – venture universities, with their diverse student and faculty bodies, are ideal for nurturing future environmental leaders.

By combining theoretical knowledge with practical experience, students are better equipped to influence environmental decision – making. Our approach creates environmentally conscious individuals who can drive conservation efforts, whether in policy – making, on – the – ground projects, or public outreach. This holistic educational model helps to build a more sustainable future, promoting effective environmental governance at local, regional, and potentially global levels.

Title:

Sensing Islands: Asian Waters, Literature, and Eco-future

Description:

As a unique junction between land and sea, island is a distinctive geographical and cultural space. This presentation will explore, through an island-centered perspective, how literature gives texture and imagination to the climate crisis? How do island-writers reconcile and address the existential threats of rising sea levels and increasing temperatures? As a form of resistance, this project explores how narratives make environmental issues more perceptible—giving voice to marine life, tides, corals, and other natural elements. Additionally, this project contextualizes island ecological issues within a broader temporal scope, reconsidering the everyday life of island residents, redefining the relationship between humans and nature, and rethinking the global ecological responsibility shouldered by humanity.

Title:

Fukushima at the Core of Humanities

Description:

This talk outlines my unit for the 2025-2028 UCI Humanities Core curriculum on “Environment.” Humanities Core at Irvine enrolls 1000 students per year and has nine instructors, three per quarter, from across the humanities. Usually no one from Asian Studies participates, but from 2025-2028 two of the nine faculty are in Japanese Studies. Mine unit is last and presents a few key arguments from my forthcoming book, Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia. Rather than Fukushima, we focus on the Minamata Mercury Poisoning Incident via Paradise in a Sea of Sorrow (1969) by Ishimure Michiko and Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971) by Tsuchimoto Noriaki. Both suggest that poor people in Minamata knew in the 1960s what STS micro-plastics scholar Max Liboiron explains in Pollution is Colonialism (2021), and what Fukushima teaches as well. When pollution is “in here,” not “out there,” we must find ways to care for the self and the land without aiming for purity. The unit builds to a debate between Saitō Kōhei and Donna Haraway. Saito’s argument in Degrowth Manifesto (2024) that a “Green New Deal” won’t work is depressingly convincing. But what about his argument for degrowth? Is it true that late Marx’s said we need not socialist revolution but simply undoing the “metabolic rift” that happens when capitalism uses more than the planet can supply? I return to Staying with the Trouble (2016) to contrast Haraway’s “string figures,” which is much more emotional.

Title:

Pedagogical Implications of Food Care at Hansalim Jeju Cooperative

Description:

This presentation explores the pedagogical implications of food care at the Hansalim Jeju Cooperative in Jeju, South Korea. In the current global food system, the economically disadvantaged and vulnerable have difficulty feeding themselves. Hansalim started “food care,” i.e., making food a commons through caring, to take care of those people.
Hansalim’s food care targets not only the economically disadvantaged but also the “food poor,” those who struggle to access food for a variety of reasons, including housing instability, lack of time or cooking skills, illness, immobility, cultural differences, and the like. Importantly, Hansalim’s food care is organized by local residents themselves. Through this engagement, residents have learned that there are vulnerable and food-poor people in their own neighborhoods, for whom they have practiced food care using local resources, such as local agricultural products.
One of these practices is “verb finding.” Locals participating in food care were asked to write verbs in blanks to create campaign phrases: “____ healthy food naturally and take care of each other.” The verbs could include share, make, deliver, eat, farm or others. Through practices described by these verbs, locals have transformed themselves into agents of food care. This presentation will identify the pedagogical implications of specific features of Hansalim’s food care.

Title:

Floods, Folk Religion, and Urban Change: The Stone Rhinoceros Rumor in Southwest China, 2013–2018

Description:

This paper examines the “stone rhinoceros rumor” in Sichuan, southwest China, from 2013 to 2018, to explore the intersections of folk religion and environmental history in the context of flood events. In 2018, Sichuan experienced a devastating rainstorm that affected more than 5 million people. Following the disaster, an earlier online rumor resurfaced, claiming that the recent floods were caused by the excavation and relocation of a stone rhinoceros unearthed in 2013 from the heart of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province.

By analyzing this rumor and its impact, I argue that despite the dominance of atheist ideology, popular religion remains a significant framework in urban China through which residents interpret their relationship with nature and culture, particularly in the face of climate change and rapid urban development. This resilience of religion is shaped not only by local beliefs but also by the tourism industry’s translation of Chengdu’s glorious history of sustainable irrigation. These dynamics contribute to broader discussions in environmental history, particularly regarding how historical narratives shape public responses to natural disasters and urban change.