Ben Weilun Zhang

I am an interdisciplinary geographer working at the intersection of political/cultural geography, economic anthropology and environmental sciences. My dissertation research investigates the recent "coffee boom" in southwest China (Yunnan, Sichuan) and its borderlands in Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam) amidst China's new ecological and rural developmental agendas. Looking through and beyond the political economy of food, agricultural commodities and agrarian livelihood, my research uses ethnography and archives to follow colonial botanists, contemporary scientists, state officials, financial investors, urban entrepreneurs and Indigenous farmers who grapple with the proliferation of Chinese coffee and its legibility in the global market. I examine multiple entangled relations between plants, crops, foods, landscapes and communities through which obscured histories of biopolitical otherness and classifications emerge across nation-state frontiers. Trained as an urbanist and anthropologist, I am still continuing research and teaching in urban studies, redevelopment politics, materiality and temporality of urban landscapes, especially focusing on built heritage preservation in Shanghai. My publications can be found or are forthcoming in Routledge Handbook, Annali Ca' Foscari, China Perspectives and Space & Culture. I hold a BA in Anthropology and Metropolitan Studies from New York University Shanghai and an MSc from the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship program in Urban Studies. At the University of Minnesota, I hold a Graduate Minor in Anthropology. I am a research affiliate at The New Institute Center for Environmental Humanities, University of Venice. I have additional research interests in environmental media, such as visual culture, soundscapes, and curatorial practices for the natural and built environment.