Research Expertise and Interest

political economy of development, historical and feminist political ecology, critical food and agrarian studies, Science and Technology studies, feminist theory, African studies, Tanzania, critical ethnography, participatory research

Research Description

Youjin B. Chung is Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the Energy and Resources Group. As a broadly trained rural sociologist and human-environment geographer, her research brings together critical development studies, political ecology, food and agrarian studies, science and technology studies, and African studies from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. She draws on ethnographic, archival, survey, and participatory visual methods to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and socio-ecological change in Sub Saharan Africa with a focus on Tanzania. She is interested in understanding how agrarian landscapes, livelihoods, and lifestyles articulate with capitalist forces, and how these processes of uneven encounter reshape the identities and subjectivities of rural women and men, as well as their relationships with the state, society, and the environment.

She is currently completing a book manuscript, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures, which examines the social and gendered dynamics of a stalled large-scale agricultural land deal in coastal Tanzania. Her second project investigates the role of gender, race, species, and science in the making of the “livestock revolution” in Tanzania and the wider region.