Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor
*Note for prospective students: I am not accepting new graduate students at this time*
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 (Division of Society and Environment).
PhD, Development Sociology, Cornell University
MPhil, Development Studies, University of Cambridge
BA, International Studies & Journalism and Communication, Korea University
political economy of development, historical and feminist political ecology, critical food and agrarian studies, African studies, Tanzania, feminist theory, science technology studies, critical ethnography, visual methods
Rural sociologist and human-environment geographer by training, her research lies at the intersection of the political economy of development, feminist and historical political ecology, critical food and agrarian studies, science and technology studies, critical animals studies, and African studies. She draws on ethnographic, archival, and participatory visual methods to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and agrarian-environmental change in Sub Saharan Africa with a focus on Tanzania. She is interested in understanding how agrarian and pastoral landscapes, livelihoods, and lifeways articulate with capitalist forces, and how these processes of uneven encounter reshape the identities and subjectivities of rural women and men, as well as their relationships with the state, society, and the environment.
Her current research projects in Tanzania investigate some of the most contentious issues in contemporary development and environmental politics in Africa: large-scale agricultural/land investments, sustainable livestock intensification, and the critical minerals rush. Read more about her research on her website.
2024. Chung, Y. B. Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2024. Chung, Y. B. “Historicising Sustainable Livestock Intensification and Animal Genetic Improvement in Africa: Towards a Decolonial Multispecies Climate Justice.” Journal of Peasant Studies. Advance online publication: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2285430
2021. Chung, Y. B. and M. Gagné. "Guest Editor's Introduction: Understanding Land Deals in Limbo," African Studies Review 64(3): 595-604. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2021.73
*companion blog piece in Africa Is A Country : https://africasacountry.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-land-grabs-in-africa
2021. Chung, Y. B. "The Curious Case of Three Male Elders: Land Grabbing, Lawfare, and Intersectional Politics of Exclusion in Tanzania," African Studies Review 63(4): 605-627. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2020.125
2020. Chung, Y. B. "Gender and Land Grabbing," in Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture , Carolyn Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith, eds. London: Routeledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429199752
2020. Chung, Y. B. “Governing a Liminal Land Deal: The Biopolitics and Necropolitics of Gender,” Antipode 53(3): 722-741. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12612
2019. Chung, Y. B., S. L. Young, and R. Bezner Kerr. "Rethinking the Value of Unpaid Care Work: Lessons from Participatory Visual Research in Central Tanzania," Gender, Place, and Culture 26(11): 1544-1569. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1556611
2019. Chung, Y. B. “The Grass Beneath: Conservation, Agro-Industrialization, and Land-Water Enclosures in Postcolonial Tanzania,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(1): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1484685
2017. Chung, Y. B. “Engendering the New Enclosures: Development, Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania,” Development and Change 48(1): 98-120. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12288
Contact details
Youjin B. Chung
345 Giannini Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-3050