Tim Oakes: Leading Multiple Workshops, Research Grants and Public Outreach

Tim Oakes, Professor of Geography, is interim faculty director at the Center for Asian Studies which was awarded a $2.2 million grant from the US Department of Education’s Title VI program. He told 9News:  “One of the missions of CAS is to make Asia as accessible as possible for as many people on campus and in our broader community as we can. That’s from expanding Asian studies in the curriculum here at CU Boulder, making study abroad opportunities available to a wider variety of students especially students who don’t have the financial resources to otherwise study abroad.”

Prof. Oakes continues to be active in research. He gave two keynotes this year. One in February, titled “Cities just beyond reach: infrastructures of post-urbanism in China” at the Finnish Society for Development Research Annual Meetings, in Helsinki. He gave another Keynote in Montreal in May, titled “Suspension cities: infrastructures of post-urbanism in China” at the McGill New Cities Conference: Concrete Futures? The (Im)material Lives of New Cities Built From Scratch. He will be giving another keynote coming up in December at the the 10th East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography (EARCAG 2022) in Taipei. The theme is New Geopolitics in East Asia.

Professor Oakes is the Principal Investigator on the ChinaMade project, where he organized and hosted the 4th ChinaMade workshop (“From ‘China Model’ to Global China”) in May at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. This was the final workshop of the ChinaMade project and featured scholars from the US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sweden. Professor Emily Yeh of the Department of Geography also participated.

As a result of a workshop Prof. Oakes co-organized in Switzerland last year, ChinaMade has co-published two policy-orientedfactsheets on Chinese export development. These factsheets are public-facing and intended for a more general audience (in addition to the scholarly work and books published by Oakes).

And as Principal Investigator on the Tale of Two Asia’s project, Oakes also organized a workshop last April in Boulder on “China’s Nuclear Belt & Road: Socio-technical Perspectives on China’s Expert Nuclear Infrastructures.” The workshop featured presentations by scholars from the US, Canada, Australia and India.