Assistant Professor, Department of Global Development
John Zinda studies social and environmental change, primarily in rural China. His research and teaching examine how state policies and community practices intersect to shape livelihoods and landscapes in contexts of agricultural development programs, afforestation efforts, biodiversity conservation, tourism operations, and labor migration.
Research Focus
As an environmental sociologist, John studies how people make and respond to environmental change and how groups of people do or do not work out concerns about the material world. His research focuses on the transformations that accompany efforts to change rural livelihoods and conserve natural resources in China. Drawing from scholarship in environmental sociology, political ecology, and coupled natural and human systems, he joins social and biophysical data to understand how changing livelihoods and state-society relationships articulate with dynamic ecologies in the context of major environmental protection efforts.
Teaching Focus
Teaching sociology is a challenging exercise in citizenship. John's aim is to work together with students to understand how social and environmental worlds work and to evaluate claims people make about social and environmental affairs. That means collectively tackling historical events and contemporary patterns in ways that help students develop constructive critical thinking, statistical literacy, empathetic understanding of the lives of people in differing social contexts, and the ability to make and defend sound arguments that are vital to civic life. His teaching focuses on relationships between environmental and socioeconomic change, globally and in China.
Awards and Honors
A.H. Kolb Award (2013) Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Selected Publications
Journal Publications
Zinda, J., & Kapoor, S. (2019). Metabolic fractures: How household livelihood practices differentiate agricultural input use in southwest China. Journal of Rural Studies. 71:1-12.
Explaining Heterogeneous Afforestation Outcomes: How Community Officials and Households Mediate Tree Cover Change in China. Sustainability and Development Conference (SDC). November 2018. World Development Journal and the School for Environment and Sustainability, the International Institute Enterprise Fund, the African Studies Center, and the Provost’s office, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor, MI United States.
Metabolic Fractures: How Household Livelihood Practices Differentiate Agricultural Input Use in Southwest China. Obstacles to Development: 7th Annual Sociology of Development Conference. October 2018. Section on the Sociology of Development, American Sociological Association. Urbana, IL.
Ecological Civilization in the Mountains: Discourse and Practice in China’s Walnut Boom and Bust. Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. August 2018. American Sociological Association. Philadelphia.
Education
Doctorate, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2013
Master of Science, University of Michigan, 2007
Certificate, Johns Hopkins University - Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, 2005
Lindy Williams, professor of global development and a member of the Migrations Lab, profiled two cities in the province of Luzon as they face the risks and consequences of frequent flooding. Despite these problems, “climate-driven migration is...