Environmental anthropology, waste, material culture, science and technology, urban studies, development, China. 

My research focuses on the politics of environmental management and urbanization in contemporary China. My current book project explores how waste infrastructures, materials and their technical interventions ground and condition the forms, possibilities and limits of China’s emerging urban environmental politics. Articles based on this research are published in China Perspectives (2014) and the edited volume Fueling Culture (2017). My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada). Prior to joining NYU, I was the An Wang Postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

2017

Zhang, Amy. "China". Fueling Culture: 101 Words For Energy and the Environment. Edited by: Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger. Fordham University Press.

2016

Hebdon C., M. Lennon, F. Ludlow, A. Zhang and M.R. Dove. "Pedagogies of Climate Change" in Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations . 2nd Edition. Ed. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall. Routledge, 388-398.

2015

Claus, A., S. Osterhoudt, L. Baker, L. Cortesi, C. Hebdon, A. Zhang and M. Dove. "Disaster, Degradation, Dystopia: Political Ecologies & Epistemologies of Disasters." Handbook of Political Ecology, R. Bryant and S. Kim, eds. Edward Elgar Publishing, 291-304.

2014.

Zhang, Amy. "Rational Resistance: Homeowner contentions against waste incineration in Guangzhou." Special feature: Contested Urban Spaces: Whose right to the city? China Perspectives. 2014(2): 45-52.

2014

Zhang, Amy. "Elan Vital." In To See Once More the Stars: Living in a post-Fukushima World. Edited by: Daisuke Naito, Ryan Sayre, Heather Swanson and Satsuki Takahashi. New Pacific Press.

2012

Zhang, Amy. "Human Waste." Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.    

Updated July 2017

In the upcoming year, in addition to preparing my book manuscript and articles, I will be working on a project to examine the ecology of the scraps sector in southern China. In addition, I will conduct a collaborative project with visual artists and other scholars on a scrap yard in Philadelphia.