Xi Wang, PhD 2021

I completed my Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder in May of 2021, while the world was still quite unsure what was happening with the COVID-19 pandemic, whether the variants that would emerge in the U.S. after Alpha, Beta, and Delta would become even more contagious, how effective recently-available vaccines would be, whether removing mask mandates as summer was blossoming would return us to “normal,” and whether education in the coming fall would be delivered remotely, face-to-face, or some hybrid of the two. As for me, I was scrambling to finish my dissertation and arrange my defense after a year of teaching Geography courses remotely through CU’s Continuing Education program; five weeks after having been sick in bed with COVID—and was still struggling to walk for more than a block without fatigue and wheezing; and a month after interviewing (remotely) for the assistant professor position that I am now in. 

Our department graduation was also conducted on Zoom—a platform that now needs no explanation. And my dissertation defense was the first one held face-to-face in Guggenheim for probably more than a year after the pandemic had become the reality of our lives, and it also had a Zoom component so that the people who had supported me during my graduate years could join from afar. But almost all of my committee attended in person, and so did a few friends. After the defense, I quickly said my farewells, met up with close friends and a former student, said goodbye to the people at my favorite watering hole, Trident Café, held a small outdoor gathering with my co-op housemates, and rapidly packed up all the belongings I had accrued in a place I called home for nearly a decade onto an RV and drove onto my next destination. The last few years have been odd, among other things.

COVID-19 amplifies so many of the themes that pervade our lives—some that have been ubiquitous and others that had been more hidden—including many that are explored in the discipline of Human Geography and the field of political economy. These include themes of space and time; of strong and weak connections; of relationality; of the material and how changes in production processes and supply chains impact different individuals differentially; and how wealth creation and distribution often exacerbate existing disparities, especially in times of crisis—be it a global pandemic or the Ukraine-Russian war. This past year is the first in awhile that I have had to procure my own groceries (I had lived in a housing co-op where others did this chore), and I have been shocked at the quickly rising food prices. As I write in mid-April 2022, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that international wheat prices have increased by 50% between February and late March, approaching 450 USD for a metric ton that a year ago had costed 225 USD. Both Ukraine and the Russian Federation are exporters of wheat and the natural gas needed to produce nitrogen-based fertilizer, and the war—in short—is impacting supplies. Our globalized economy means that we all feel these impacts, but experience them differentially—I may be miffed by having to pay more for food, but inflation, rising food and fuel costs coupled with an economy that has struggled under COVID-19 lockdowns have led to hunger and massive protests in Peru, and I wonder what kind of blow soaring wheat and maize prices are having on Somalian herders whose livelihoods have already been devasted by more frequent and longer-lasting droughts in the last decade. I sometimes feel at a loss for what to do amidst everything that is happening. 

Geography, the field of political economy, my co-advisers Dr. Emily Yeh and Dr. William Boyd, and the faculty and graduate students at CU have given me invaluable analytical frameworks and tools to make sense of phenomena happening at different scales of space and time. Agrarian households tied to world markets that have been made vulnerable to climate change and global commodity price fluctuations is not a new story, I tell a version of it in my dissertation chapter on dairy farmers in Inner Mongolia, China. The broader story I tell in my dissertation is that the massive amount of overcapacity in Chinese coal power generation the past decade has been deliberate—that it is a product of the Chinese state’s imperative to maintain large flows of capital investment and economic growth. And the consequences are profound for the workers who build these power plants and nearby villagers, as well as for local and regional environmental pollution and global climate change.

I have been able to share some of this research as part of a panel hosted by China Environment Forum at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2021, with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources, and in a forthcoming journal publication. Political economy, world markets, agrarian households, Somalia herders, climate vulnerability, and climate policies are all topics I explore with Western Washington University students in a new course I’ve added to the university catalog: Climate Change Policy Tools. I am also teaching Advanced Energy Policy and Northwest Energy Systems Transitions. And will be designing another new course, Community Solutions to Climate Change, in the near future. The more that I teach, the more I realize that telling people something is often not enough. Student learning deepens with seeing concepts modeled, and experiencing and practicing them firsthand. Thus, I am also piloting a restorative justice framework for students to use for peer engagement, drawing from the models developed by Longmont Community Justice Partnership in Longmont, Colorado—models I learned while living in Boulder’s housing co-op system. I am working with colleagues to expand this training outside the classroom, potentially for the entire College of the Environment. Finally, I will be starting up research this summer that examines the intersection of housing, poverty, energy access, and climate vulnerability in Bellingham, Washington and surrounding regions. It’s a cool time to be an energy geographer and social scientist. In the face of overwhelming global events, I am drawing on the disciplinary and experiential tools my communities have shared with me to help people, including myself, deepen their understanding of the connections of what’s happening in our world, and what we can do about it.