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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright

Academic Profile

Anna joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2009, jointly appointed by the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS). She has a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University; an MA in Chinese Studies and a BA in Anthropology, both from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Before taking up her post in Oxford, Anna worked as a lecturer and research fellow in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. She also previously held a Departmental Lecturership in the Modern Politics and Society of China at the Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Oxford.

Anna's work embodies a particular synergy between human geography and the study of China and focuses on environmental pollution, development and health in the Chinese countryside. She is a keen supporter of long-term ethnographic field research and since 2004 she has carried out a total of 18 months of fieldwork in Southwest China (Sichuan province and more recently Yunnan). Her work is concerned with unpacking the naturalisation of perceptions of health and pollution, how they are produced and their political economic overtones (for instance how dependence on a nearby factory might make pollution acceptable). This offers a new type of bottom-up political ecology, which does not assume local communities are passive and isolated victims of development and capitalist oppression, nor that they are inherently 'nature-friendly' but focuses on the agency of farmers or workers in polluting industries, potential conflicts of interests and attitudes to 'clean nature' versus 'pollution'.

Anna's work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now AHRC), the Leverhulme Trust, and more recently the United States Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Rockefeller Foundation. She strongly believes in interdisciplinarity and in its value for understanding environmental health problems. For this reason, she has been involved since 2007 with the SSRC's China Environment and Health Initiative, which is designed to bring together social scientists working on these issues. As part of this initiative, she led a project on 'citizens' perceptions of rural industrial pollution and its effects on health', which included scholars from legal and political science, anthropology, sociology and public health as well as a Chinese NGO, the Yunnan Health and Development Research Association (YHDRA). This collaboration between disciplines and with members of China's civil society fosters a deep understanding of the mechanisms by which environmental health governance works and why it may fail to do so. This research is of vital importance to policy makers, NGOs and the broader community, and Anna is strongly committed to disseminating such work beyond academia through widening participation initiatives, public talks and research collaborations.

Current Research

Anna's current research covers a diverse range of topics, including: how socio-politically situated perceptions of development, consumerism and fake or unsafe food intersect with attitudes to health and pollution in the Chinese countryside; environmental health activism; lay cancer aetiologies; home care for illness and attitudes to formal healthcare provision; how coexisting moral economies of subsistence and the market are articulated in everyday life; the interplay between eating practices, Bourdieusian taste and social status in rural China; historically formed perceptions of fatness and health; and a more layered understanding of the 'state' and local agency.

Anna's monograph Fighting for Breath: Cancer, Healing and Social Change in a Sichuan Village is based on a total of 16 months of fieldwork in rural north-east Sichuan province starting in 2004. It is the first book-length ethnography to offer a bottom-up account of how families strive to make sense of cancer and care for sufferers in contemporary rural China. It explores lay perceptions of illness causality and everyday practices of care as prisms to understand how relationships with family members, locality and the state are reproduced or contested since the socio-economic reforms.

Since 2006, her interests in cancer and in the mutual relationship between health, human activity and environment have led Anna to focus more closely on pollution in rural China, and she has organised and taken part in several interdisciplinary workshops on these topics. Her ongoing research on ecological knowledge, land use and people's engagement with farm chemicals and food markets has resulted in two articles in the leading journals The Journal of Contemporary China (2010a) and Social Anthropology (2009a), which unpack the relationship between farmers' agency and the perceived connection between illness and water pollution in rural China. Her related work on Chinese farmers' socially, culturally and economically generated sense of lack entitlement to meat and milk (2007), and to hospital care (2010b) engages with debates around the social reproduction of inequality. Anna's most recent work examines the impact of perceptions of environmental damage to health on patterns of response by comparing two sites affected by pollution in rural Yunnan. She is currently working to expand this project to involve Chinese medical geographers, with whom she also plans collaborative research on local reactions to pollution from mining and environmental health governance.

Teaching

Anna lectures for the module 'Nature and Society' on the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy and for 'The Study of Modern China', a core module for MSc Modern Chinese Studies.

Current graduate students include:
  • No SoGE students currently listed
  • Sam Geall (Manchester University)
    Pollution and the Press: Investigating Eco-governmentality in Contemporary China.
  • Lina Chun (with Prof. Mike Edmunds)
    South-North Water transfer in China.

Selected Publications

Authored Books
  • Lora-Wainwright, A. (under review, 2010) Fighting for Breath: Cancer, Healing and Social Change in a Sichuan Village
Academic Journal Papers
Book Chapters
  • Lora-Wainwright, A. (forthcoming, 2010b) "If you can eat and walk you do not go to hospital" – Farmers' attitudes to healthcare in contemporary China. In, B. Carrillo and J. Duckett (eds.) Social Problems and the Local Welfare Mix in China: Public Policies and Private Initiatives. London: Routledge. Selected essays from the Provincial China Workshop 2008, Tianjin University.
  • Lora-Wainwright, A. (2009b) Fatness and Wellbeing: bodies and the generation gap in Contemporary China. In, Y. Zheng and B. Turner (eds.) The Body in Asia, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Official Reports
Working Papers