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Loretta Ieng Tak Lou is an assistant professor in anthropology at Durham University in the UK. She specializes in the study of environment, health, activism, and self-development in East Asia. Her first project was an ethnographic study of “Green Living” in Hong Kong and its implications for self-development, relationality, everyday ethics, and social movements. Building on her interest in environmental activism in East Asia, her second research project, funded by the European Research Council, “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry,” focuses on the ways Chinese people negotiate and make sense of toxic pollution, their perceptions of (environmental) injustice, and how they cope with contrived ignorance. In her research projects, she questions the interplay between freedom and (inter-)dependency, resistance and resilience, noticing and unnoticing, and the production of knowledge and ignorance in the most mundane forms in everyday life.
RCC Research Project: The Power of Example: Green Living and Social Transformations in Hong Kong
Selected Publications:
- “From Hygienic Modernity to Green Modernity: Two Modes of Modern Living in Hong Kong since the 1970s.” In Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity and Transnational Exchange 1945–1990, edited by Yunah Lee and Megha Rajguru, 105–120. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
- “The Art of Unnoticing: Risk Perception and Contrived Ignorance in China.” American Ethnologist 49, no. 4 (2022): 580–594. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13099.
- with Nele Fabian. “The Struggle for Sustainable Waste Management in Hong Kong: 1950s–2010s.” Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 2, no. 1 (2019): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5334/wwwj.40.
- “Freedom as Ethical Practices: On the Possibility of Freedom through Freeganism and Freecycling in Hong Kong.” Asian Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2019): 249-65. https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2019.1633728.
- “In the Absence of a Peasantry, What, Then, Is a Hong Kong Farmer?” Made in China Journal 2, no. 4 (2017). https://madeinchinajournal.com/2017/12/24/in-the-absence-of-a-peasantry-what-then-is-a-hong-kong-farmer/.
- “The Material Culture of Green Living in Hong Kong.” Anthropology Now 9, no. 1 (2017): 70-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2017.1291055.