John Zinda

About

John Zinda studies how people and environments make and remake each other. His research and teaching examine how state policy initiatives come into landscapes and converge with the individual and collective practices of people in those landscapes.

In the United States, he studies how people in flood-affected communities confront risk. How do people perceive flood risk when it is not always visible, and how do they respond to it amid other issues they face in their communities? How do people manage fraught choices about buying insurance, protecting homes and neighborhoods, or moving? Working with collaborators in community organizations and local and state governments, his team is examining how responses to flood risk emerge at the intersection of social disparities, collective action, and policy interventions.

In China, he has worked with ecologists, geographers, anthropologists, and agricultural scientists to understand how people and landscapes respond to efforts at rural development, reforestation, and biodiversity conservation.

He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and a faculty affiliate in Cornell’s East Asia Program and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

Teaching Focus

John teaches courses in environmental sociology, risk and disaster, and spatial thinking and geographic information systems. His teaching focuses on working with students to link conceptual understandings around our relationships with the more-than-human world to concrete instances across the expanse of human and ecological variety. Students draw on this knowledge to conduct social-environmental analyses that illuminate struggles for social and environmental change.

Selected Publications

• Jessica D. Ulrich-Schad, John A. Zinda, Hua Qin, David Matarrita-Cascante, Jennifer E. Givens, and Chuntian Lu. 2024. Unveiling Perspectives and Insights: A Survey of Environmental and Natural Resource Sociologists and Social Scientists. Society & Natural Resources.
• Zinda, John A., Ziyu Zhao, James Zhang, Lindy B. Williams, David L. Kay, and Sarah M. Alexander, and Libby Zemaitis. 2023. How Homeownership, Race, and Social Connections Influence Flood Preparedness Measures: Evidence from 2 Small U.S. Cities. Environmental Sociology 9(3):284-300.
• Zinda, John A. 2023. Unpacking Authoritarian Environmental Governance: Gauging Authoritarian Elaboration in China and Beyond. Sociology of Development 9(2):195-216.
• Zinda, John A., and Amit Anshumali. 2022. How Gender Dynamics Shape Off-Farm Work in Upland Southwest China. Rural Sociology 87(4):1244-1273.
• Zinda, John A., James Zhang, Lindy B. Williams, David L. Kay, and Sarah M. Alexander, and Libby Zemaitis. 2022. Different Hazards, Different Responses: Assessments of Flooding and COVID-19 Risks among Upstate New York Residents. Socius 8:1-20.
• Zinda, John A., Lindy B. Williams, David L. Kay, and Sarah M. Alexander. 2021. Flood Risk Perception and Responses among Urban Residents in the Northeastern United States. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 64:102528.
• Zinda, John A. and Jun He. 2020. Ecological Civilization in the Mountains: How Walnuts Boomed and Busted in Southwest China. Journal of Peasant Studies 47(5):1052-1076.
• Kuras, Evan R., Paige S. Warren, John A. Zinda, Myla F. J. Aronson, Sarel Cilliers, Mark A. Goddard, Charles H. Nilon, and Richelle Winkler. 2020. Urban Socioeconomic Inequality and Biodiversity Often Converge, but Not Always: A Global Meta-Analysis. Landscape and Urban Planning 198:103799.
• Zinda, John A. and Zhiming Zhang. 2019. Explaining Heterogeneous Afforestation Outcomes: How Community Officials and Households Mediate Tree Cover Change in China. World Development 122: 385-398.
• Zinda, John A. 2017. Tourism Dynamos: Selective Commodification and Developmental Conservation in China’s Protected Areas. Geoforum 78: 141-152.

Recent Courses Taught

• GDEV 3240: Environmental Sociology
• GDEV 3140: Spatial Thinking, GIS, and Related Methods
• GDEV 6210: Fundamentals of Environmental Sociology
• DSOC 6340: Risk and Disaster