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Ralph A. Litzinger

Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Box 90091, Durham, NC 27708-0091
201F Friedl Building, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


I am an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cultural Anthropology. My early research focused on ethnicity, nationalism, and post-socialism in China. I published articles on nationality theory in China, memory work, and ethnic politics in the post-Cold War global order, on gender and film, photography, and popular culture. Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press, 2000) was the first major ethnographic study to examine the work and writing of minority intellectuals in the imagining of post-socialist futures.

Over the last decade or more my research has focused on activism and advocacy work around the environment, labor, migrant education. I have published essays on the transnational and media dimensions of anti-dam protest in southwest China; on global environmental NGOs and the privatization of nature; on self-immolation among Tibetans; on transnational activism directed at Apple and the companies that source its supply chain; and on the emerging field of global media ecologies.

The Cultural Anthropology special online issue, “Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet” https://culanth.org/fieldsights/93-self-immolation-as-protest-in-tibet  was for several years the most downloaded in the history of the journal Cultural Anthropology’s “Hot Spot” series.  “The Labor Question in China: Apple and Beyond” http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/112/1/172.abstract  was the most downloaded article in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 2013.  I am the co-editor of Ghost Protocols: Development and Displacement in Global China (Duke University Press, 2016).  I am currently working on two book projects, Migrant Futures: Education and Labor in Global China, and Black Lung: An Ethnography of Dust, a collaborative project with former students, miners and labor activists in China.  

Service to the discipline and the university has been a major priority for me. From 2001-2007, I directed Duke’s Asia/Pacific Studies Institute. During this period, I raised over five million dollars for East Asian studies programming at Duke, send the first Duke students in Trinity College to China and other East Asian countries with funding for research and internships, developed APSI’s MA program in East Asian Studies, worked to found the rural education non-profit Dream Corp International (http://www.dreamcorps.org/en/our_programs.html), and the student-led newspaper and now web-based magazine, Duke East Asian NEXUS (http://www.dukenex.us). I also worked with Duke’s Development Office to write the successful application for the Oscar Tang Named Professorship (now held by Professor Prasenjit Duara in Duke’s History Department). From 2007-2008 I co-directed the Mellon-Sawyer seminar, “Portents and Dilemmas: Health and the Environment in China and India, A Comparative Study.”

I have been deeply involved in raising Duke's profile in China. From 2008-2015, I directed the Duke Engage Migrant Education project, a ten-week immersive project at a middle school for the children of migrant workers on the rural-urban fringes of Beijing http://www.dandelionschool.org/a/ENGLISH/general/2011/0105/general_info.html. From 2011-2013, I co-directed the India-China Global Semester Abroad program, and an Environment, Health, and Development seminar at Beijing University. In 2013, I was awarded the Howard Johnson Excellence in Teaching Award, and, in the same year, the Duke Engage Excellence in Student Mentoring Award. for many years I was on the advisory board of the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), the leading trans-regional labor activist organization in East Asia (http://sacom.hk). I serve on the editorial board of the China Environment and Wealth Series at the University of Amsterdam Press, the journal Identities, and several other press and online ventures.

I have has served on curriculum, hiring, and assessment committees at the Duke Kunshan campus in China, and was a core member on the committee that authored DKU’s global liberal arts curriculum. I offer courses on "Global Apple, “Migrant China,” “Environmental, Health and Development in China,” “Anthropology and Film,” “Global Environmentalism and the Politics of Nature,” “Theorizing the Anthropocene." My most recent new course, offered in the Spring of 2022, is “Under Surveillance: Everyday Digital Life.”  

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology · 2001 - Present Cultural Anthropology, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Affiliate, Duke Global Health Institute · 2009 - Present Duke Global Health Institute, University Institutes and Centers

Education, Training & Certifications


University of Washington · 1994 Ph.D.
University of Washington · 1990 M.A.
Evergreen State College · 1985 B.A.