Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System

Date(s)： 2024/02/27

Time： 10:00~12:00

Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall

Host： Prof. Fu Jia-Chen ( Associate research fellow ,IMH, AS)

Speaker：Prof. Jerry C. Zee（Assistant Professor of the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI),Princeton University, USA.）

Organizer： Western Learning and China Research Group

摘要：
This talk explores mobile sands and floating dusts as a medium of a contemporary political and meteorological condition in China and downwind. Decades of Reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Based on ethnographic research at multiple points in the formation and trajectory of a major dust event, Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, we explore contemporary China both as a geopolitical entity and as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?
 

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