Youjin B. Chung

Research Program

How and why do development policies and processes that aim to deliver socio-environmental benefits often reinforce existing power structures and marginalize the groups they intend to serve?

This longstanding question and paradox drives my research program. Over the years, I have channeled this central animating concern into three main research streams. Using Tanzania as an analytic case, my current projects investigate some of the most contentious issues in global development and environmental politics: 1) large-scale land acquisitions for the expansion of plantation agriculture; 2) the intensification of livestock production amid accelerating climate change; and 3) the scramble for rare earth elements in the global transition to clean energy.

I use these distinct but interrelated issues as a window into the rural as a key site of capitalist development, a laboratory of technoscientific experimentation, a space of struggle, and a sacrifice zone for powering low-carbon futures and the ever-increasing demands of modern urban life. Across all my projects, I attend to the enduring logics of development and improvement; the structural and everyday mechanisms through which social and environmental injustices and intersecting inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity, and class are perpetuated; and the ways heterogeneous groups of rural people experience and respond to development and change.

A wide range of critical social theory and intellectual movements have inspired my work, including feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, critical race theory, decolonialism, and posthumanism. In framing my inquiries, I draw on various interdisciplinary fields of knowledge influenced by these theories, including feminist political ecology, the political economy of development, critical food and agrarian studies, African studies, science and technology studies, and critical animal and multispecies studies.

Methodologically, I have a sustained interest in ethnography, historical analysis, participatory research, and visual and multimodal methods. My empirical toolkit comprises such methods as participant observation, interviews, focus groups, archival research, oral histories, community mapping, and photovoice (participant-driven documentary photography and visual storytelling). I combine these methods, wherever appropriate, to better understand the complexities and contradictions of everyday life and the ways capitalist forces impinge on and reshape rural landscapes, livelihoods, identities, bodies, and subjectivities.

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures

Cornell University Press, 2024
Download open-access e-book or order a copy here.
For a 30% discount on your order, use the code 09BCARD.

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape is the first ethnography and a feminist political ecology of the twenty-first century land rush in Africa. In the mid-2000s, the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a Swedish investor to convert over 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land in Bagamoyo District into a sugarcane plantation. Anticipated to be the largest agroindustrial investment in East Africa to date, the project aimed to produce sugar, electricity, and ethanol to enhance national food and energy security, while contributing to global climate goals. Ten years on, however, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified the project as another in a long line of failed modern resource grabs. I argue that such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender, history, culture, politics, and ecology shaped the project’s unfolding, but also how, even in its stalled state, the deal upended social life on the land by setting in motion incomplete processes of development and dispossession. By tracing the varied lived experiences of rural women and men and their struggles for survival under a seemingly endless condition of liminality, I raise critical questions about the directions and stakes of postcolonial development in Tanzania and the shifting meanings of identity and belonging for those on the margins of capitalist agrarian transformation.

This research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and various grants from Cornell University. Open-access publishing was made possible by the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, the Berkeley Excellence Accounts for Research Program, and the Energy and Resources Group.