Narratives of China's Environment: Crisis, Hope and the Spatiality of Blame

Elizabeth Lord, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Environment and Society, Brown University

This project examines narratives that are mobilized to understand China’s contemporary environment. It explores prominent ways to represent and rationalize China’s environmental questions, and dwells on the implications and the spatialities of each. More specifically, the project focuses on the crisis narrative, on the idea that China may be an eco-leader, and on how environmental blame is directed towards China. Through these narratives, I ask whether environmental scholars are recasting—or ‘environmentalizing’—an orientalist gaze. At stake is the necessity to discuss real and severe environmental problems without pathologizing a rising China, and the need to unpack the politics of environmental knowledge production at a time of ecological stress.

Elizabeth Lord studies the politics of environmental knowledge production and the effects of China’s environmental policies on inequality. She graduated from the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto in 2017, was an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. She has lived three years in China and has conducted environmental research in Zhejiang, Hubei and Shaanxi.

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