Youjin B. Chung is Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (Division of Society and Environment).

Rural sociologist and human-environment geographer by training, her research lies at the intersection of the political economy of development, historical and feminist political ecology, critical agrarian and food studies, African studies, and science and technology studies/feminist science studies. She draws on ethnographic, archival, and participatory visual methods to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and agrarian-environmental change in Sub Saharan Africa with a focus on Tanzania. She is interested in understanding how agrarian landscapes, livelihoods, and lifestyles articulate with capitalist forces, and how these processes of uneven encounter reshape the identities and subjectivities of rural women and men, as well as their relationships with the state, society, and the environment.

She is currently completing a book project, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures, which examines the gendered processes and outcomes of a stalled large-scale agricultural land deal in coastal Tanzania. Her second project investigates the role of gender, race, species, and science in the making of the “livestock revolution” in Tanzania and the wider region.

Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley, Dr. Chung taught at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. She holds a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University and a M.Phil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.