Anna Lora-Wainwright

Anna joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2009, jointly appointed by the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS). She has a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University; an MA in Chinese Studies and a BA in Anthropology, both from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Before taking up her post in Oxford, Anna worked as a lecturer and research fellow in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. She also previously held a Departmental Lecturership in the Modern Politics and Society of China at the Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Oxford.

Anna's work embodies a particular synergy between human geography and the study of China and focuses on environmental pollution, development and health in the Chinese countryside. She is a keen supporter of long-term ethnographic field research and since 2004 she has carried out almost 2 years of fieldwork in rural China (Sichuan province and more recently Yunnan, Hunan and Guangdong). Her work is concerned with unpacking the naturalisation of perceptions of health and pollution, how they are produced and their political economic overtones (for instance how dependence on a nearby factory might make pollution acceptable). This offers a new type of bottom-up political ecology, which does not assume local communities are passive and isolated victims of development and capitalist oppression, nor that they are inherently 'nature-friendly' but focuses on the agency of farmers or workers in polluting industries, potential conflicts of interests and attitudes to 'clean nature' versus 'pollution'.