Hung, Po-Yi

CONTACT INFO

Hung, Po-Yi

Professor

Office : Room 408, Department of Geography

Email : poyihung@ntu.edu.tw

Phone : +886-2-33665846

Website : http://poyishome.wordpress.com

BIOS

I am Po-Yi Hung, an Associate Professor in Geography at National Taiwan University. I received my Ph.D. from UW-Madison with major in human geography and minor in cultural anthropology. Before I went to UW-Madison, I earned two masters degree. One is in social ecology of development and conservation from Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the other in environmental planning from National Taiwan University.

My research focuses on nature-society relations. More specifically, I use agricultural practices and food trade as my lens to investigate the relations amongst people, place, and environment. I have conducted researches in Taiwan and China, and plan to extend my research to Southeast Asia.

Research interests: Political Ecology, Food and Agriculture, Development Studies, Landscape, Space and Place.

RESEARCH

My current project, Mountains of Green Gold: Tea Production, Land-Use Politics, and Ethnic Minorities in Southwest China, investigates the relationship between cross-regional tea trade and ongoing physical and symbolic changes in China’s southwest frontier environment. By focusing on the common-pool resource of what is deemed “ancient tea forest” (guchalin), I aim to understand the interactions among tea trees, entrepreneurs, the state, and an ethnic minority population (the Bulang). In this research, I also seek to address the resulting politics over land-use practices in southwest China. I analyze the material and ideological components of the tea forest by looking into the ecological changes, market forces, and state interventions. In addition to conducting interviews and archival research, I have conducted intensive ethnographic research to engage in local Bulang villagers’ everyday life, where the tea landscape in southwest China is symbolically and materially reproduced.

Extended from my current project, my future research is about the relationship between the rural development of cash crops and urban consumption of organic food in China. While cash-crop plantations have taken over subsistence agriculture in many places, in southwest China cash crops of many ethnic minorities’ agricultural practices have closely related to the burgeoning organic consumption in urban China. Nevertheless, little is known about what the environmental and social implications are behind the emerging urban-rural connections resulted from the organic production and consumption of food. Therefore, based on my current research about tea trade in southwest China, I propose two interconnected topics to initiate my next research project. First is the development of organic food consumption in urban China and its relationship with China’s food security and the state interventions in public health. Secondly, I will examine how the urban consumption of organic food has reshaped the modern regime of environmental governance and generated a mechanism to transform the agrarian society through land-use practices in rural China. In the long run, I intend to think beyond the limitation of regarding southwest China as a remote and peripheral resource frontier. I aim to re-conceptualize the frontier as a relational space, where the nature-society relations have been significantly affected by the production, distribution, and trade of agrarian products. Given the fact that Yunnan and Southeast Asia has been closely connected due to the cross-boundary flows of goods and people, I plan to expand my research scope to explore Yunnan’s trading relations with Southeast Asia, the trade of agricultural products in particular.

In the long term, I expect to collaborate closely with scholars working on Southeast Asia, especially those studying cross-boundary trading activities, highlanders’ agricultural practices, and people-environment dynamics. I believe the collaboration will both empirically and theoretically enrich my own research. In the meantime, my expertise in southwest China, Taiwan, and East Asia in general, will also contribute to the scholarship of Southeast Asia studies.

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2013)

Master of Environmental Science, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University (2005)

Master of Science, Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Taiwan University (1999)

Bachelor of Arts, Department of English, Fu-Jen Catholic University (1997)

COURSES

Introduction to Human Geography

Thesis (b.s.) (1)(2)

Landscape, Culture, and Power

Introduction to Political Ecology

Cultural Geographies of Landscape

Geographies of Globalization : a Critical Introduction

Food, Agriculture, and Society

Global Political Ecology

Fieldwork Workshop

Seminar (Ⅰ)

PUBLICATIONS

GRANTS

AWARD

2023 111學年度教師教學優良獎

2012 Mellon-Wisconsin Dissertator Fellowship, Mellon Foundation and the State of Wisconsin

2011 Whitbeck Dissertator Fellowship, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2010 Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange

2010 IGERT-China Associate Award, IGERT-China Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2009 2009 China Times Cultural Foundation Young Scholar Award, China Times Cultural Foundation

2009 Trewartha Research Grant, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2009 “Remaking the Developmental State” Research Grant, Center for World Affairs and Global Economy (WAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison

2008 2008 Taiwan Ministry of Education Studying Abroad Fellowship Ministry of Education, Taiwan

2007 Global Studies Scott Kloeck-Jenson Pre-Dissertation Fellowship University of Wisconsin-Madison

2005 UW-Madison University Fellowship (with tuition waive and monthly stipend), University of Wisconsin-Madison 2004 Tropical Resources Institute Fellowship, Yale University

2004 Agrarian Studies Fellowship, Yale University

2004 School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Summer Research Award, Yale University