About me

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 outskirt 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 manuscript Cutting the Mass Line: Moving Water and the Political in Southwest China, aims at rethinking social scientific approaches to collective action by exploring China’s ongoing water crisis from the vantage point of Huize County, a water-stressed, 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 water 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 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: experts, activists, 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. He is one of the founders and 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. Moreover, Andrea is 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. In 2019, Andrea organised an international workshop on Open Access, Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom and designed a new teaching module on Public Anthropology. He is also an assiduous contributor to the anthropology website ALLEGRA Lab.

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, and Public Anthropology.

Expertise Details

China; law; rural sociology; collective action; water; common-pool resources; political economy; environmental justice; prefigurative politics; infrastructure; digital ethnography; public anthropology.

Books

2024. Cutting the Mass Line: Moving Water and the Political in Rural China. Johns Hopkins University Press.

2014. Storia della Antropologia Cinese [Italian Translation of Hu et al. 2008. 中国人类学是],Pia A. E. (Ed), SEID Edizioni, Firenze.

Articles

2023. Ghosts in the Shell: The Promises of Water Users’ Associations and the Double Life of Elinor Ostrom’s Design Principles in Rural China. Journal of Political Ecology 30(1): 62–83.

2022. Commento a ‘Bronislaw Malinowski, l’antropologia pratica, la politica, e il colonialismo’ di Antonino Colajanni. ANUAC 11(2): 76-77.

2020. ‘Jurisprudential Massage’: legal fictions, radical citizenship and the epistemics of dissent in post-socialist China. Cultural Anthropology 35(4): 487-515.

2020. Di che Cosa Parliamo Quando Parliamo di Beni Comuni? Ripopolare l’immaginario politico-ecologico attraverso l’esperienza Cinese, Sulla Via del Catai 19:121-38.

2019. We Want Everything! A commentary to Pun Ngai’s The New Chinese Working Class in Struggle, Dialectical Anthropology 44: 331-335.

2019. On Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Politics and Pedagogy (Part I and II). ALLEGRA Lab.

2017. A Water Commons in China?, Made in China Journal 2 (2): 30-33.

2017. Back on the Water Margin: The Ethical Fixes of Sustainable Water Provisions in Rural China, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (1): 120-136.

2016. ‘We Follow Reason, not the Law’. Disavowing the law in rural China, PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(2): 276-293. [Winner of the 2014 APLA Graduate Students Prize Paper].

2016. On Chinese Pedagogical Legalism (and Its Anthropological Ghost). ALLEGRA Lab.

2015. Disavowing the Law and Engaging Politics in Rural China, Anthropology News 56 (4): 42-43.

2012. On a Ridge Between Fields: unpacking property in land in Qing China, La Ricerca Folklorica 64: 141-156.

Book Chapters

2021. Digitised Ethnography, in Barron, A., Browne, A.L., Ehgartner, U., Hall, S.M., Pottinger, L. and Ritson, J. (eds.) Methods for Change: Impactful social science methodologies for 21^st-century problems. Manchester: Aspect and The University of Manchester.

2018. Memory Leaks: Local Histories of Cooperation as a Solution to Water-Related Cooperation Problems, in Stafford, C., Judd, E. and Eona Bell (eds.), Cooperation in Chinese Communities: Morality and Practice, pp. 101-120, Bloomsbury Publishing: London.

2017. Fighting for One's Life: The Making and Unmaking of Public Goods in the Yunnanese Countryside, in Brandtstädter, S. and Steinmüller, H. (eds.), Popular Politics and the Quest for Justice in Contemporary China, pp. 107-123. Routledge: London.

2016. Dieci anni, nove siccità. La costruzione sociale del rischio in un villaggio rurale cinese, in Ligi, G. (ed.), Percezioni di Rischio: Pratiche Sociali e Disastri Ambientali in Prospettiva Antropologica, pp. 75-106, CLEUP: Padova.

2014. ‘L'acqua è la Linfa Vitale del Popolo’: associazionismo “dal basso” e gestione delle risorse idriche nella Cina rurale, in Ferro Nicoletta (ed.), Sostenibilità con Caratteristiche Cinesi: Evoluzione e Sfide del Percorso Cinese Verso un Modello Economico Sostenibile, Edizioni l’Asino d’Oro: Roma.