Ecological States: A Book Talk with Jesse Rodenbiker, Mi Shih, Emily Yeh, and Jerry Zee

Jerry Zee

Princeton University

Jerry Zee is assistant professor in Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. His work takes shape at the intersection of the environmental humanities, political theory, feminist science studies, and experimental ethnography, and moves across China and the Pacific with the movement of Chinese dusts, moneys, and people. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley and, before arriving at Princeton, was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis, and an assistant professor of Anthropology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Among other sources, his work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the UC Pacific Rim Foundation, and the Center for Contemporary China. He is the author of the book Continent of Dust (University of California Press, 2022).

Jesse Rodenbiker

Jesse Rodenbiker is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University with the Center on Contemporary China at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Concurrently, he is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Geography at Rutgers University, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.



Rodenbiker is a human-environment geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist focusing on environmental governance, urbanization, and social inequality in China and globally. He is the author of Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (2023, Cornell University Press). Rodenbiker has written for Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Land Use Policy, and other venues. His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, among others.



Before joining Princeton, Rodenbiker served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University and as a Visiting Scholar at Sichuan University at the School of Public Administration and Department of Land Resource Management. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mi Shih

Mi Shih joined the faculty of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in 2014. Prior to this appointment, she served as an assistant professor in the Human Geography and Planning Program at the University of Alberta, Canada. Between 2011 and 2013, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the China Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She received her Ph.D. in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers University in 2010. Her research involves two major areas. Building on ethnographic fieldwork methods, she examines Chinese urbanization, particularly focusing on the role of the state, shifting urban-rural boundaries, displacement, people’s livelihood changes, and social conflicts over land development. Employing mixed research methods, her second research area focuses on planning regulation, land development rights, land assembly instruments, and discursive and institutional practices of value capture in urban development in Taiwan. She has published articles in scholarly and professional journals.

Emily Yeh

Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, as well as the co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, and Rural Politics in Contemporary China.