Adela Zhang is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in resource conflict. Her research examines large-scale extraction in Peru through the lenses of race, government, and political economy. In the classroom, she uses experiential approaches to engage students on subjects including environment, difference, and inequality.
Her long-term ethnographic work in Peru is the basis for her first book, Production after Harm (under preparation). It draws on fieldwork with central government bureaucrats, rural social leaders, and Quechua-speaking communities in the Peruvian highlands to show how democratic institutions constrain efforts to organize around the environment by redirecting aggrieved populations into struggles for limited forms of political and financial inclusion. Publications based on this work can be found in Environment and Planning D and The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.
Her current research is a bio-ethnographic collaboration with indigenous communities, toxicologists, and environmental scientists on mining exposures and environmental health in Peru’s southern Andes. This project works to integrate different disciplinary approaches, methods, and worldviews to develop more expansive understandings of contamination and how bodies, landscapes, non-human life, and social relations are reconfigured in the wake of large-scale extraction.