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.

Forthcoming. Duempelmann, S., S. Pauleit, K. Wright, R.Gioielli, A.Sinha, and A. Zhang. "Making Urban Environments: Infrastructures of power, resistance and negotiation" Special Issue: Global Environment

2021 Zhang, Amy. "From Immunity to Collaboration: Microbes, Waste and Anti-Toxic Politics." Current Anthropology 62(S24): Special Issue "Cultures of Fermentation" https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715542

2020 "Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolising Waste with the Black Soldier Fly." Cultural Anthropology 35(1):74–103. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.08

2020 "The Black Soldier Fly: An indigenous innovation for waste management in Guangzhou." in Can Science and Technology Save China? Edited by Greenhalgh, Susan and Zhang, Li. Cornell University Press, 163-183.

2019 "Invisible Labouring Bodies:Waste work as infrastructure in China." Made in China Journal. Under Construction: Visions of Chinese Infrastructure. Vol 4. Issue 2. Apr-Jun. 98-102. https://madeinchinajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Made-in-China-02-2019.pdf

2018"(Eco)Enzyme as catalyst" in the series "The Naturalization of Work." Theorizing the Contemporary. Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1506-eco-enzyme-as-catalyst

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"Rational Resistance: Homeowner contentions against waste incineration in Guangzhou." Special feature: Contested Urban Spaces: Whose right to the city? China Perspectives2014(2): 45-52. https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/6458

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.