Agenda

From Anti-incineration Activism to ‘Sustainable Living’: Some Reflections on Forms of Environmentalism in Contemporary China

Speaker: Anna Lora-Wainwright, Professor of the Human Geography of China, School of Geography and the Environment and School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford

Chair: Roberta Raffaetà, (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage)
Discussants: Francesca Tarocco (NICHE), Mankei Tam (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage)

This talk draws on two decades of research on various aspects of environmental activism and focuses especially on ongoing collaborative work with Thomas Johnson and Katherine Yuet Wong in Hangzhou, which explores grassroots initiatives broadly encapsulated by the emic term “sustainable living”. Given the steady tightening on civil society in the past decade, forms of subtle and everyday activism are taking on a special significance. We propose the concept of “prefigurative politics” to make sense of these forms of action—ranging from buying food in bulk/refill shops and collecting recyclables to establishing and promoting field-to-table vegetarian restaurants in rural and peri-urban sites—and the hopes and aspirations of those who embrace them. We argue that these actions embody efforts to reclaim agency and articulate subjectivity and care between private and public spheres. In doing so, we question the
binary between “everyday environmentalism” and contentious collective action and promote a more nuanced understanding of agency, subjectivity, and ethics.

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This project has received funding from the FARE Programme “SHK_HealthXCross project: Microbiome technoscience in Shanghai and Hong Kong in pandemic times. An anthropological study” - ID R20A8R2WH4, funded by the Italian Ministry for University and Research (MUR).