Andrea Pia is a legal and environmental anthropologist whose research sits at the interface between environmental humanities, decolonial political theory, and the critical study of the commons. 

Andrea’s regional focus over the last fifteen years has been the People’s Republic of China. So far, his work has revolved around one set of interrelated questions: How do society and the natural environment affect and constitute one another? Along what lines are the benefits and burdens of human projects for the environment distributed? What are the felicity conditions for counterprojects to emerge? 

Andrea’s first ethnographic research, which produced publications in Italian and material for a digital ethnography, was conducted in a cluster of Ming dynasty villages on the outskirts of Beijing. This research investigated man-made water shortages and the resulting patterns of environmentally induced migration among different age groups of rural residents. Its contribution was to connect migratory decisions to changing attitudes towards place, family and work and altered perceptions of environmental risk and workplace hazards. Outputs of this first piece of research explore the material and symbolic process of progressive destitution of China’s historic rural communities and its connection to the country’s current environmental predicaments. 

Andrea’s second ethnographic project and book Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China, aims at rethinking social scientific approaches to collective action by exploring China’s compounding water crises from the vantage point of Huize County, a water-challenged, ecologically damaged, multi-ethnic area of rural Yunnan Province. This research follows Chinese hydro-engineers, street-level bureaucrats, and embattled rural residents as they attend to and negotiate with the various raptures of the everyday brought about by their unwilling enrolment in the global quest for environmental sustainability. Publications from this project span from exploring the pragmatism and conflictual ethics of street-level water bureaucrats to elucidating counter-theories of property relations and the commons in rural China. Dispute mediation and grassroots collective actions have been the subject of several other publications, with a focus on the jurisprudence of conflict management in an authoritarian context.    

In 2017, Andrea began a new ethnographic and oral history project entitled Justice After Carbon. This comparative ethnographic project explores the emerging political antagonism (as well as ideological convergence) between indigenous movements, global civil society practitioners, western climate justice activists, and the Chinese energy industry as it moves to sustainably redesign energy production in and for the Global South. A multi-sited project, Justice after Carbon explores climate politics from the vantage point of compromised subjectivities: energy experts, activists, engineers and lawyers whose racialised and classed positionality inevitably shape the form and direction of their political agency in the climate crisis. Among the various activities organised as part of this research, Andrea recently put together an international symposium on the hydropower development of the Mekong River in collaboration with LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Two other co-authored research workshops, one on Degrowth and one on Global China have also provided material for this ongoing investigation. 

Andrea is deeply interested in public anthropology and the advocacy of open-access scholarship. In 2019, he organised an international workshop on Open Access, Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom and designed a new teaching module on Public Anthropology. He commissioned and edited the Association for Social Anthropologists of the UK’s 2023 report on the State of Anthropology in the UK. 

Andrea is one of the founders of the Global China Lab, a non-profit organisation established by researchers and practitioners to advance knowledge of contemporary China. He is one of the co-editors of Made in China Journal, an open-access journal and online platform hosted by the Australian National University (ANU) and supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant. He is also one of the founding members of the scholar-led editorial cooperative C40 and a contributor to the crowd-sourced digital tool The People’s Map of Global China. In 2016-2018, and again in 2022 with the support of the LSE Eden Centre and King’s College London, Andrea developed The Long Day of Young Peng, a bespoke point-and-click interactive digital ethnography that follows the day of a young Chinese migrant from his native village to Beijing. The Peng game was shortlisted for a prestigious 2023 QS Reimagine Education Award. 

Since 2013, Andrea has taught courses in Political and Legal Anthropology, Anthropology and Human Rights, Culture and Globalisation, China in Comparative Perspective, Ethnography through Mixed Media, Public Anthropology and History of Anthropological Theory.