Jessica DiCarlo

I am an assistant professor in the School of Environment, Society and Sustainability.

My research broadly focuses on development, issues at the environment-society nexus, and China’s global engagements. I have conducted research on infrastructure, land and resource politics, disasters, rural livelihoods, critical minerals, public health, economic zones, and US-China competition. I am committed to long-term fieldwork and seek to connect grounded cases with global processes. My regional expertise is in China, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Nepal.

I completed my PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and completed my masters in development studies at the University of California Berkeley.

I was a visiting Global China Initiative Fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center and later, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs as the Chevalier Junior Chair (Postdoctoral Fellow) in Transportation and Development in China.

My dissertation drew on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Laos and examines the construction and planning of the Laos-China Railway and related economic zones to ground global China in ways that pay closer attention to complex host contexts. I am interested in connecting large-scale projects and processes with the environments and lives that sustain them. I situate my research in critical development studies, political ecology, political geography, and critical infrastructure studies. My regional expertise is centered in China, where I have worked in Yunnan, Liaoning, Tibetan regions, as well as Beijing and Shanghai since 2008. My interest in Chinese borderlands led to research in Nepal, India, and Laos. My past research experiences span development, disasters, agrarian change, public health, and rural livelihoods, and rely on extensive fieldwork in these regions.

I enjoy working within collaborative and trans-disciplinary teams and have done so on a UC Berkeley-University of Bergen group researching post-disaster socioecological transitions, as an affiliated researcher at the University of Bern’s Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) in Laos, and as a foreign research on the Silk Road Environment Program within the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resource Research (IGSNRR) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I am currently a collaborator in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “Roadwork: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders” at the University of Zurich.

My website is: http://www.jessicadicarlo.org/