Joshua Muldavin is professor of geography, environmental studies, and Asian studies and former chair of social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. His prior academic position was chair and director of the International Development Studies program at UCLA. His research and teaching address global political ecology and political economy of development, urbanization, environment, food, and agriculture, with a regional focus on Asia, particularly China, Japan, and the Himalayan Hindu Kush. He has undertaken decades of field-based research and consulting on development projects, the majority in China and the greater Himalayan region. His research and policy analyses assess global resource acquisitions and development conflicts via China’s and Japan’s capital and aid flows to Africa, Latin America, and South/Southeast Asia. He has been the PI on a number of major, multi-year research collaborations: a five-country project on comparative socialist transition funded by the MacArthur Foundation; an NSF-funded project, “Conservation, sustainability and poverty alleviation in the Himalayan Region: do participatory environmental policies work?”; and a Social Science Research Council-funded project on Japan’s development aid flows to China.
He is writing a book on the environmental, socioeconomic, and geopolitical impacts of China’s contemporary transformation. In addition to publishing in academic journals, he has engaged the broader public through op-eds in the New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, South China Morning Post, and commentary for BBC World News and other media outlets. He has worked with a wide range of social movements, unions, NGOs, and civil society organizations in the US and around the world. In Asia, and in China in particular, he has also collaborated with national government ministries and scientific academies, provincial bureaus, county governments, village committees, and field research stations, as well as universities, think tanks, UN development organizations, and international foundations.
CYPLAN 180B–Research Capstone Seminar in Urban Studies: Global Urbanization, Cities in the 21st Century
Senior Lecture to the graduating class on “A Life of Learning,” (chosen by graduating seniors), Sarah Lawrence College, 2022.
Award for Media Achievement of the Association of American Geographers, 2010.
Appointed Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Geography and Asian Studies, Sarah Lawrence College, 2002
UCLA's nominee for the National Distinguished Teaching Award: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching U.S. Professors of the Year Award, 1997-98.
Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award (University-wide, five honorees per year), UCLA, 1997-98
Eby Award for the Art of Teaching (University-wide, one honoree per year), UCLA, 1997-98.
“New geographies of development: grounding China’s global integration,” Introduction co-authored with Julie Michelle Klinger, Territory, Politics, Governance, 7:1, pp. 1-21, for the Themed Special Issue “New Geographies of Development: Grounding China’s Global Integration,” co-edited with Julie Klinger, 2019.
“Fei Xiaotong,” book chapter co-authored with Huang Ping and Lynette Shi, in Key Thinkers on Development, edited by David Simon, New York: Routledge, 2019.
“Wang Hui,” book chapter co-authored with Kong Yuan, in Key Thinkers on Development, edited by David Simon, New York: Routledge, 2019.
“Using Cities to Control the Countryside: An Alternative Assessment of the China National Human Development Report 2013,” in the Forum 2015 issue of Development and Change, 2015, 46(4), pp. 993- 1009. 17p.
“Useful outsiders: building environmental policy reform dossiers,” joint book chapter with Piers Blaikie, in the International Handbook of Political Ecology, Raymond L. Bryant, Editor, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2015.
“Environmental justice? The story of two projects,” joint article with Piers Blaikie for the Themed Collection on Global Environmental Justice, Geoforum, 2014, V. 54, July, pp. 226-229.
“From rural transformation to global integration: comparative analyses of the environmental dimensions of China’s rise,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2013, pp. 1-21.
“Land From the Tiller? China’s Role in Global Processes of Land Dispossession,” Land Development Politics Initiative Conference at Cornell University, Working Paper, October 2012.
“China and Climate Change: can technology and markets solve the problem?,” in Global Carbon Reduction: Developing New Strategies and Deploying New Technologies in Japan and the United States, The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, 2008.
“The Politics of Transition: Critical Political Ecology, Classical Economics, and Ecological Modernization Theory in China,” in The Political Geography Handbook, K. R. Cox, M. Low, and J. Robinson, Editors, London: Sage, 2008, pp. 247-262.
"Upstream downstream, China, India: The Politics of Environment in the Himalayan Region," joint article with Piers Blaikie, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 3, September, 2004, pp. 520-548.
“The Paradoxes of Environmental Policy and Resource Management in Reform Era China,” Economic Geography, Vol. 76, No. 3, July, 2000, pp. 244-271.
“Aiding Regional Instability?: The Paradox of Japanese Development Assistance to China,” Geopolitics, Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 2000, pp. 22-47.
“Assessing Environmental Degradation in Contemporary China’s Hybrid Economy: State Policy Reform and Agrarian Dynamics in Heilongjiang Province,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 87:4, December 1997, pp. 579-613.
“The Political Ecology of Agrarian Reform in China: The Case of Heilongjiang Province,” in Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, Richard Peet and Michael Watts, editors, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 227-259.
Additional academic publications in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geopolitics, Geoforum, Economic Geography, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Environment and Planning A, among others.