by Jieun Cho, postdoctoral associate
The second meeting of the Environmental Futures in Asia Network (EFAN) took place on May 15–16, 2025, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Building on the success of the inaugural workshop held in Jeju, South Korea, in 2024, this year’s symposium furthered EFAN’s threefold mission: supporting emerging scholars in advancing their research agendas; facilitating interdisciplinary conversations on methods and theories related to environmental challenges in Asia; and cultivating collaboration by connecting scholars to one another as well as community stakeholders and practitioners.
Presenters represented a wide range of academic disciplines, including environmental science, political science, history, anthropology, geography, and literature. Anchored in Duke’s institutional commitment to environmental and climate justice, the 2025 EFAN workshop emphasized pedagogy—broadly defined to include teaching, advising, action-oriented learning, and community engagement—as a critical means for engaging Asia’s role in global environmental futures.
Keynote Address
The workshop opened with a keynote lecture by Kim Fortun (UC Irvine) titled “EcoEd: Teaching to Attest.” Drawing on decades of ethnographic engagement with environmental disasters and science studies, Fortun outlined a pedagogical framework shaped by the conditions of “late industrialism,” an era defined by infrastructural breakdowns, cascading risks, and epistemologies of denial.
Reflecting on her own experience growing up in petrochemical landscapes in the United States, she explained she had learned an “art of not seeing”—a socially and structurally embedded way of ignoring environmental harm and its potential. This, she added, is central to late industrial logic—an epistemological condition sedimented into landscapes through “tightly coupled” social, political, and environmental systems.
Fortun emphasized that a late-industrial pedagogy must not merely give voice, but instead build capacities—providing students, scholars, and communities with tools to name what is happening, trace relations, and intervene in impactful ways. Drawing on her work with schools, advocacy networks, and expert communities, she described how she began teaching students to design sustainability projects, role-play stakeholders, and engage in case studies.
By interpreting, discussing, and creating knowledge through various modes of action, students learn that knowledge translation requires different skill sets from knowledge engineering. They discover how they can play a critical role in building collective capacities to work through complex problems.
In the final portion of her talk, Fortun turned to the importance of “knowledge infrastructures”: collaboratively built platforms, archives, case studies, and analytic tools that allow communities to navigate slow-moving crises that may span regions as well as generations. She introduced her work with PECE (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography) and projects like the Environmental Injustice Global Record. These infrastructures can also expand our capacity to examine “data divergence,” tracing how the same sets of data can be interpreted and used differently over time, depending on the dynamics of the communities that mobilize them in their own context.
Fortun’s keynote address framed environmental pedagogy not only as one-way transmission of knowledge, but as a collaborative process of “scaffolding” pathways for “just transitions.” Pedagogy in this sense is not just how we teach about the world, but how we find ways to expand and pass down what we study and lay the groundwork to know and transform the world in more accountable ways.
Thematic Panels and Pedagogical Experimentation
Four thematic panels spread across the two days of the workshop explored how pedagogy can serve as both method and medium for environmental inquiry in and beyond Asia. Each panel highlighted approaches to teaching environmental justice, multispecies entanglements, climate governance, and environmental care work.
These sessions foregrounded not only the content of environmental learning, but also the forms it might take, from field immersion to archival inquiry, stakeholder role-play, dialogues with AI, and artwork.
Panel 1: Reimagining Environmental Pedagogies
The opening panel, “Reimagining Environmental Pedagogies,” explored critical, historical, and affective approaches to environmental pedagogy.
Margherita Long discussed the idea of teaching “degrowth” by putting it in conversation with literature that emerged from the aftermath of detrimental pollution, such as Michiko Ishimure’s listening-writing on Minamata. Such juxtaposition can be useful in encouraging students to consider how “nature” can be related not only a force or threat, but as having different communities, histories, and possibilities.
Victoria Lee walked attendees through her pedagogical practices for her (mostly) engineering students, in which she introduces historical knowledge as a way to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in engineering practice and to answer big questions that don’t seem to have “right” answers—with concrete examples of industrial waste, HIV virus, and microbes.
Ting Hui Lau introduced what she calls “scyborg pedagogy” as a way to counter ecological fatalism in the contexts of techno-authoritarian education, emotional detachment, and learned helplessness, offering affective rewiring in learning experience as a pedagogical necessity to nurture a sense of connection, agency, and futurity.
Panel 2: Rising Scholars in Asian Environments
The second panel, “Rising Scholars in Asian Environments,” brought together early-career scholars at Duke who are experimenting with religious, aesthetic, and legal frameworks to study environmental complexity. The panelists and discussant highlighted how cultural forms—literary, religious, ecological, and juridical—serve as critical frameworks for understanding the layered complexities and contradictions that shape environmental governance in contemporary Asia.
Based on her coursework on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s archive at Duke, Yixuan Jiang discussed how Sedgwick’s attention to Buddhism and its queer and environmental potential had been woke through “encounter” with cancer, as a wake-up call to inhabit life differently.
Yangfan Li asked if literary, technological, and media practices may change how we “sense” islands in ways to cultivate deterritorializing modes of attunement both ecologically and socially.
Anqi Zheng argued that Fengshui beliefs continue to shape environmental discourse in China today, based on her study of how the unearthing of an ancient stone rhino sculpture in Chengdu prompted speculative rumors and public protests that linked the disturbance to recent urban flooding.
Yu-An Kuo examined how the ambiguous legal status of swiftlet farming in Malaysia is reshaping the relationships between small-scale, ethnically diverse farmers, bureaucratic regulations, and precarious livelihoods.
Panel 3: Pedagogical Collaborations
The third panel, “Pedagogical Collaborations,” focused on community-based pedagogies linking food, land, and climate justice.
Ja-Kyung Kim and Suh-Hyun Park presented on the Hansalim Jeju Cooperative’s efforts to create food commons rooted in local needs, demonstrating how care-based infrastructures—such as publicly accessible common refrigerators—can redefine food as a relational, ecological, and political issue. These initiatives are local responses to the issue of food insecurity in Jeju and, more broadly, are motivated by a long-term critique of Seoul-centered policy frameworks and infrastructures—which have been showing signs of breakdown.
Christian Lentz and Terese Gagnon shared their fieldwork and field trips involving a community garden in North Carolina as a site of multispecies, migrant, and refugee relationality, showing how “garden” generates more than food; they create pedagogical encounters with contested belonging, ontological precarity, and environmental justice.
Wumeng He shared his experience piloting a climate change course that actively incorporated AI with aims to personalize environmental learnings. His students were asked to “dialogue with AI” to simulate stakeholder negotiations, to explore multiple trajectories to come up with an answer to complex issues, and to learn the significance of linguistic expression in framing policy debates.
Brendan Galipeau emphasized systems-thinking across climate, energy, food, and waste—what he calls the “three Es”: environment, equity, and ecology—as a framework resonant with Indigenous cosmologies. Drawing on his research among Tibetan communities in Southwestern China and the Atayal people in Taiwan, he teaches how indigenous worldviews interpret climate change not as a purely environmental disruption, but as a response to social and spiritual failures—which may offer a foundation for environmental ethics that challenges climate colonialism.
Panel 4: Environmental Governance
The final panel, “Environmental Governance,” addressed how legal frameworks, data practices, and citizen science shape environmental education and advocacy.
Juliette Duara discussed how Earth jurisprudence can be taught through legal case studies such as the Tuhoe community’s hut-building project in New Zealand, raising critical questions about who can speak for nature in legal procedures. Her presentation highlighted how, even within tight-knit communities, representing the rights of nature poses complex challenges that demand pedagogical imagination—which can also benefit from postcolonial perspectives in considering the status of non-humans.
Sofyan Ansori presented his collaborative research on fire governance in Indonesia, showcasing how “fire play”—his fieldwork-based collaboration using exhibitions, comics, and film-making—disrupts the dominant flame/blame/shame narrative on indigenous fire practices.
Jimmy Choi presented an undergraduate teaching agenda which presents shorebirds as key interlocutors in biodiversity and conservation concerns. Binbin Li also introduced a citizen science initiative on bird collisions in urban landscapes in China, which mobilized over 5,000 volunteers to monitor and mitigate threats caused by glass buildings and LED lights. Integrating fieldwork, simulations, and low-cost design solutions into the DKU undergraduate curriculum, they underscored how cultivating ecological awareness through data, design, and observation can transform students into active participants in multispecies care and environmental governance.
Building connections beyond the lecture hall
At the end of the first day, participants gathered on the rooftop garden of Grainger Hall to continue discussions initiated by the opening keynote address and first two panel presentations.
Expanding the conversation, Madison Chudzik, a PhD student in biology at Duke University, gave an informal presentation about her novel project that captures birds’ nocturnal flight calls, a key part of a larger research goal to understand the impacts of climate change and light pollution on avian migration.
Field-Based Learning and Community Engagement
Continuing EFAN’s commitment to integrating place-based learning, participants joined two field excursions during the second day of workshop. In the morning, Alex Nickley led members of the group on a birding excursion at the nearby Duke Pond to learn about the substantial biodiversity that surrounds us, hidden in plain sight.
An hour’s stroll revealed 14 species of bird, including some stellar neotropical migrants such as the Great-crested Flycatcher and Red-eyed Vireo. As Nickley noted, these birds travel hundreds of miles from Central and South America, reminding us how environmental connections transcend national boundaries.
In the afternoon, group experienced a small piece of Asia in North Carolina with a visit to Transplanting Traditions, a community farm in Orange County, that networks, supports, and teaches refugee and small-scale farmers from Southeast Asia to build food sovereignty through culturally resonant and sustainable agricultural practices. All of the farmers are originally from Burma (Myanmar), though some were born in refugee camps in Thailand and other countries before settling in North Carolina.
The farm began as a community garden project, gradually expanding into a larger project that incorporates community building as well as enhancing economic stability for the farmers. Participants on the tour spoke with organization leaders about their collaborations with community members, their use of high tunnels and test plots, and how programs for children were developed as a direct response to a need for cultural touchstones.
These two site visits grounded the workshop in local environmental work, while providing comparative points of reflection on cross-cultural migration, agricultural labor, and multispecies care.
Collaborative Ethos
Throughout the workshop, a strong ethos of collaboration and mutual learning animated the discussions. Presenters and participants alike emphasized the need for pedagogical approaches that move beyond extractive models of environmental knowledge and toward shared forms of capacity-building.
Emerging scholars engaged with senior researchers in generative ways during sessions and between meals, and multiple participants reflected on how the workshop inspired them to reimagine their teaching and advising practices.
Future Directions
EFAN’s 2025 iteration successfully deepened the network’s intellectual and institutional foundations, showcasing how Asia-focused environmental research can serve as an interdisciplinary platform for rethinking pedagogy, justice, and collaboration. To support future development, participants also formed a steering committee to guide programming, coordinate collaborative outputs, and strengthen institutional partnerships.
Looking ahead, the network plans to develop collective teaching materials, explore modes of co-publication, and expand partnerships with community organizations and academic institutions across Asia and the US. In doing so, EFAN aims to contribute meaningfully to Duke’s Climate Commitment and to the broader project of reimagining environmental futures through socially engaged scholarship.
