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

Amy Zhang is an anthropologist and political ecologist whose research investigates environment, technology, labor, and urban life. Her first book Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (forthcoming Stanford University Press), is a study of the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies traces ecological experiments in the early 2010s, in which Chinese policy makers came to waste management as an issue of environmental governance central to the creation of “modern” cities. In Guangzhou, waste’s transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China’s approach to the environment: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. At the same time, waste provoked an unlikely political coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics.

Articles based on this research appear in Current Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Science Technology & Human Values (forthcoming), Made in China, China Perspectives, Global Environment as well edited volumes such as Can Science and Technology save China?, Handbook of Political Ecology, among others. Her 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, she was the An Wang Postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

Ph.D. 2016 Joint Degree in Anthropology and School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University

M.A. Globalization Studies, McMaster University

BA (Honors) English Literature, Simon Fraser University

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.