Title

Volunteering for the environment in China: The Urban as a Terrain of Problematization

Authors

Lisa Hoffman

Publication Date

12-16-2020

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This contribution argues that Aihwa Ong’s approach to the urban as problem-space is a powerful and underutilized conceptual tool for studying contemporary urban worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with an environmental nongovernmental organization in Dalian, China, it suggests that environmental volunteering signaled important shifts in the specification of citizen-subjects and in what counted as effective urban governance. Making sense of such urban assemblages required flexible methodological tools, and Ong’s approach of the urban as a terrain of problematization offers this. This conceptual and methodological move facilitates a middle-range theoretical approach that accounts for patterns and emergent paradigms while allowing for contingency, not forcing complex assemblages into singular or universal explanations. It is this kind of anthropology and ethnographic analysis that enables better understandings of our contemporary (global) urban worlds.

Publication Title

Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Volume

10

Issue

3

First Page

1046

Last Page

1048

DOI

10.1086/712097

Open Access Status

OA Journal

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