Zhou Yongming, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will present, “Agent of Change: Road Building and Global Positioning in Southwest China” Thursday, November 5, at 11 a.m. at the Pyle Center, Room 227.
Viewing roads as agents of change that can bring rapid and complex transformations in both the ecological and social systems, Yongming purposes to bridge the gaps separating mono-disciplinary research on “road ecology,” “road economics,” and “road sociology,” making an interdisciplinary study of “roadology” and therefore, appreciating better the complexity of roads’ impacts. Using China’s recent massive road building in the Southwest as a case in point, Yongming will examine the efforts by local authorities to rebuild the Stilwell Road (Burma Road) and analyze how spatial reconfiguration, historical reinvention, and economy of hope all contribute to make the road building as an imagined means of global integration in Southwest China.
The event is sponsored by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN).
Learn more about Zhou Yongming
Zhou Yongming is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D in cultural anthropology from Duke University. He is the author of books Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History, and State-Building (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford University Press, 2006). In 2001-2002, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC. He has also been a Mellon Fellow at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge and a visiting fellow at the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.