- This event has passed.
Left to Live and Die: Resource Security and the Biopolitics of Land Stockpiling in China
February 27 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Speaker: Ross Doll, Lecturer, Blum Center for Developing Economies, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Nick R. Smith, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies Program, Architecture Department, Urban Studies, Barnard College
Moderator: Qin Gao, Professor and Director of China Center for Social Policy, Columbia University School of Social Work
Beginning in 2007 the Chinese state used liberalizing policy and funding to encourage the expansion of large-scale grain farming. Despite this support, many of the new farms have financially struggled and folded. Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics and resource security literature, Ross Doll argues that with modernized agriculture the state primarily sought to create not commercial farms but redundant farming infrastructure, which it needed to buffer its growing reliance on food imports while abiding by the global trade regulations needed to sustain its urban export manufacturing economy.
Speaker’s Bio: Ross Doll is a lecturer in the UC-Berkeley Blum Center for Developing Economies. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on longterm ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing on food security, landscape, and rural politics. Dr. Doll teaches courses on the geographies of natural resources, global and Asian development, and global poverty. He holds a PhD in Geography and a MA in China Studies from the University of Washington.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by China Center for Social Policy.
Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
