Friends call me Eddie.
I studied Economics and Chinese at the University of Washington-Seattle and spent nearly two years of my undergrad at Sichuan University picking up a Sichuanese accent and studying the first Clean Development Mechanism projects developed in Western China. I then worked for the University of Washington Worldwide program between 2007-2009 as a Program Manager supervising undergraduate student research projects conducted in Sichuan. During that time, I was also co-managing a large archival project in the Sichuan University Museum on Euro-American ethnographers, archaeologists and missionaries.
I received my MA in Applied Anthropology from Oregon State University where I participated in the interdisciplinary IDAM Project that explored the socioeconomic, biophysical and geopolitical impacts of hydropower development. My MA thesis, however, was an ethnographic study of the Ersu Tibetans’ cultural understanding of agriculture. For my doctoral research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong I conducted ethnographic and survey-based research on rising environmental consciousness in the city of Chengdu. I then used discourse analysis to explore Ecological Civilization, the Chinese Communist Party's interpretation of sustainable development, to demonstrate how ideology, perception and action came to form an environmental consciousness in communities in Chengdu.
As a postdoc on the interdisciplinary Airborne Project at the University of Oslo I examined how the historical production of energy is connected to the formation of and changes within the broader political power structures found throughout Chinese society. I briefly returned to Hong Kong as a Postdoc in 2019 to help the Anthropology Department at CUHK promote their excellent research on ethnic minority issues in the city. Between 2020-2021, I was Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Studies where I was studying contentious heritage, memorialization of pandemics, national park management and industrial heritage. Most recently as a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, I managed the NSF-funded Project Confluence where we have been studying the way community groups and academics collaborate together to address unmet challenges related to environmental, climate, and energy injustice in the Phoenix region .