Ralph Litzinger

Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University

Professor Litzinger’s early research focused on ethnicity, nationalism, and post-socialism in China. He published articles on nationality theory in China, memory work, and ethnic politics in the post-Cold War global order, on gender and film, photography, and popular culture. His book, Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press, 2000), was the first major ethnographic study to examine the work and writing of minority intellectuals in the imagining of post-socialist futures.

More recently, his research has focused on activism and advocacy work around the environment, labor, migrant education. He has published essays on the transnational and media dimensions of anti-dam protest in southwest China; on global environmental NGOs and the privatization of nature; on self-immolation among Tibetans; on transnational activism directed at Apple and the companies that source its supply chain; and on the emerging field of global media ecologies.