Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography and former Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His most recent research explores the development and use of leisure and consumption spaces in China’s urban areas, as well as in urbanizing areas of rural China. He is currently working on urban planning and infrastructural urbanism in China’s ‘New Area’ urban zones. His most recent book is Making Cultural Cities in Asia (2016). Tim has held visiting professor positions at the University of Hong Kong, Guizhou Minzu University, the National University of Singapore, Wageningen University, and the University of Technology, Sydney. He holds research affiliations at Cornell University and at the College of Media, Communication, and Information at CU Boulder.

Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder.  She has conducted extensive research on development and nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, vulnerability to climate change, ideologies of nature and nation, and emerging environmental subjectivities.  Her book Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development explored the intersection of political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization.  She also co-edited Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands with Chris Coggins, and Rural Politics in Contemporary China with Kevin O’Brien and Ye Jinzhong.  She has also explored the relationship between China’s development in its own western regions with its investment and development abroad. She has a long-term interest in the Chinese state’s infrastructure development in Tibetan areas, such as the Chengdu-Lhasa railway.  She has also conducted research on post-Sichuan earthquake reconstruction of houses and roads, and is currently exploring the ways in which nature is being made into a type of infrastructure under Xi Jinping’s campaign for ‘ecological civilization.’

Max Hirsh is a leading expert on airports and urban infrastructure. He is the author Airport Urbanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), an unprecedented study of airports and air travel that incorporates the perspective of passengers, airport operators, architects, urban planners, developers, and aviation professionals. Based on 10 years of research conducted at more than 50 airports around the world, the book sheds light on the exponential increase in global air travel and its implications for the planning, design, and operation of airports. Fluent in six languages and with a professional career spanning three continents, Max inflects his analyses with unique insights into the practicalities of international air travel and the mindset of people on the move. Max has taught courses on transportation, infrastructure, and urban studies at Harvard, ETH Zurich, and the University of Hong Kong. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard and a Magister from the Technical University of Berlin. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Hang Seng Bank, Henry Luce Foundation, German Research Foundation, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Max is a Sin Wai-Kin Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, an associated researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, and a lead author of the International Panel on Social Progress.

Dorothy Tang, RLA, is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the National University of Singapore. She recently completed her PhD at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and has been an adjunct assistant professor at the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. She is a landscape architect interested in the intersections of infrastructure and everyday life. Her work engages with urban and rural communities situated in landscapes confronting large-scale environmental change. Current research projects are concerned with the role of eco-imaginaries in shaping green infrastructure in Chinese Cities, and Chinese engagement with Zambian urban development. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University, and is a registered landscape architect in the State of New York.

Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University, where he researches infrastructure development and the politics of mobility along the China-Myanmar border. He completed his doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen with a dissertation on the Karakoram Highway and China-Pakistan cross-border interactions. Prior to joining Tallinn University he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Asian Studies, as well as at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at LMU Munich. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands.

Lin Zhu is an independent scholar interested in the political economy and political ecology of Global China. Her work interrogates Chinese mining investment in Peru through an ethnographic lens, focusing on the social and economic impacts on the ground. She holds an MA in Human Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder and is a contributor to the People’s Map of Global China project.