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 Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. As a broadly trained sociologist and geographer, she studies the relationship between gender and inequality, rural development, and socio-environmental change in East Africa, with a focus on Tanzania. The overarching question that drives her research program is: how and why do development policies and processes that aim to improve sustainability and equity outcomes often reinforce existing power structures and marginalize the groups they intend to serve? Over the years, she has channeled this central animating concern into three specific research projects. Using Tanzania as an analytic case, these projects investigate some of the most contentious issues in global development and environmental politics: large-scale farmland investments, sustainable livestock intensification, and the critical minerals rush. Her work attends to how these global processes reshape local landscapes, livelihoods, and lifeways, and how rural communities on the ground experience and respond to these transformations.

She is the author of Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures (Cornell University Press, 2024). At Berkeley, she convenes the Critical Ruralities Lab, a collaborative mentoring space that promotes empirically grounded and justice-oriented scholarship on development and socio-environmental change in the global countryside.

Read more about her work and the lab here.