Book Project: On Broken Ground: Landscape, Development, and the Politics of Precarity
On Broken Ground addresses a key topic of debate in agrarian studies: large-scale land acquisition and development. The book explores a rural township venerated by the Chinese state for its rapid implementation of large-scale and mechanized grain farming, but whose apparent success belies its coerced and uneven results. Drawing on a long-term ethnography including participant observation and 220 formal and informal interviews, the book argues that such uneven agrarian change must be understood in relation to place-based historical ecologies and politics. The book shows that generational state neglect gave rise to hierarchical inter-village power relations and varied everyday experiences of (in)security. Over time, these experiences shaped place-based moral economies, which were reflected in patterns of collective resistance to or compliance with the modernization policy and rural officials’ bullying tactics. The state’s policy reforms mobilized rural officials to act quickly, but they also encouraged a formalistic approach that weakened the township’s historical adaptive practices and features, rendering the area more vulnerable to ecological disturbance and undermining farmers’ productivity. By illuminating the long durée embodied, affective, and socio-environmental dynamics that engender and undermine collective action and resilience, the book raises important questions about the causes and consequences of modernist resource development and suggests that in ignoring the rich and often troubling past of place we risk building a precarious future.
Journal manuscripts
2022 Doll, R. “Agricultural Modernisation and Diabolic Landscapes of Dispossession in Rural China.” Antipode 54 (6): 1738-1759. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12857
2021 Doll, R. “Cultivating Decline: Agricultural Modernization Policy and Adaptive Resilience in the Yangzi Delta.” Human Ecology 49 (1): 43-57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-020-00206-9
Under Revision
2023 Doll, R. “Rural Politics, Everyday (In)Security, and the Moral Economies of Place in Rural China,” submitted to the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
In Progress
Doll, R. “Left to Live and Die: Agricultural Modernization, Large-Scale Farmers, and the Reflexive Biopolitics of Resource Security in China,” to be submitted to Antipode in December 2023 as part of a special issue on “Post-agrarian Questions: Land Futures and Surprise in the Countryside,” ed. H. Faxon and C. Lund.
Doll, R. “Labor Security, Lineage and Solidary Groups, and Community Reproduction in China.” To be submitted to The End of Rural China? The Political Economy of Rural Transition, ed. J. Donaldson, E. Meyer-Clement, K. Looney, R. Trappel, and J.W. Zeuthen in February 2024.
Doll, R. “Putting the Miracle in Its Place: Historical Geographies of Rural Policy and Development in Taiwan.” To be submitted to The China Quarterly in April 2024.