Youjin B. Chung is a rural sociologist and feminist political ecologist who research examines the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and socio-ecological change in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Tanzania. Her research program is animated by the question of how global capitalist and technoscientific processes that aim to deliver various sustainability outcomes come into friction with local power dynamics and reshape rural landscapes and livelihoods in uneven and unexpected ways. She uses ethnographic, historical, and participatory visual methods, including participatory photography (photovoice).

She is currently working on three projects in Tanzania. The first examines the phenomenon of ‘global land grabbing,’ the surge in large-scale land investments in Africa and across the global south for the production of food, fuel, and other primary commodities. This project is culminating in a book, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s Enclosures (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). The second focuses on the process of ‘sustainable livestock intensification,’ the transformation of subsistence-oriented pastoral and agropastoral systems into modern industrial livestock operations to increase meat and dairy yields while mitigating climate change. The third investigates the ‘rare earth rush’ or the global scramble for rare earth elements, the demand for which is growing to manufacture so-called green and high-end technologies, such as wind turbines, electric cars, to military defense systems.