CURRENT TEACHING (Autumn 2023)

Supervision of two bachelor theses.

Courses

• Responsible teacher of the master level course Migration and Social Change - A Life Course Perspective (KG 7245, 15 hp) 
• Lecturer in the master level course Globalization, Environment and Social Change (KG7242)

PREVIOUS TEACHING

Lectures, seminars, lab exercises and administration in courses

• at both undergraduate level and graduate level
• with themes on population geography, migration, natural resource management, political ecology, planning and methods
• with both qualititave and quantitative methods

Courses at the undergraduate level

• Geografiska strukturer och samhälle
• Globala processer
• Challenges of Planning in the Global South
• Swedish Geography
• Essay on Swedish Geography
• Befolkningsgeografi
• Kvantitativa metoder i Samhällsplanering II
• Ekonomiska geogafi
• Omvärldanalys
• Miljöutmaningar i ett samhällsperspektiv
• Vetenskapsfilosofi
• Befolkning, utveckling och globalisering

Courses at the graduate level

• Political Ecology – Land Use and Natural Resources in a Local to Global Perspective
• Planning Practices in Cities and Regions
• Urbanisation and the Environment
• Migration and Social Change
• History of Geographical Thoughts

Supervision

Theses in geography at the undergraduate level and in the master program of "Globalisation, Environment and Social Change".

New project

Digital Nature:Everyday social-technical relations and practices within Sweden’s rural agriculture and wild harvesting industries, led by Qian Zhang, participated by Natasha A. Webster, Linn Axelsson and Shengnan Han, financed by VR special programme Social Consequences of Digitalization for three year (2023-2025).

See news report

Närmare 27 miljoner i bidrag från Vetenskapsrådet - Stockholms universitet

Abstract. Digital platforms are fundamentally transforming the way we live, work and play, normalizing everyday digital-social-spatial relations. The dominant articulation of ‘platform urbanism’ makes one wonder what the social consequences of platformization are in rural areas and the ways digital life in the rural may be theoretically and empirically different. In Sweden, despite high hopes that digital technologies will make the rural competitive and attractive, we know little about social-technical practices and relations in the rural, and how the diverse rural spaces and places are connected to and from platformization. This project asks: 1) How is digital technology incorporated into everyday social and economic life in specific Swedish rural contexts? 2) How do everyday digitally mediated practices change rural social-technical relations and spatialities? 3) What are the consequences and implications of these relations for regional development? 4) What role does platformization play in normalizing, reproducing or reinforcing social inequalities/divides? Utilizing ethnographic, digital and computational methods, we will explore the questions in three nature-based industries situated in varied Swedish rural contexts – Beekeeping, Organic Farming and Wild Berry Refinement. This project has strong social relevance by addressing rural development, sustainability, and equality. We further advance this material to theoretically explore the role of rurality in shaping digital relations.

Other ongoing projects

Integration Delivered? Unveiling immigrant experiences in the growing Swedish gig economy (2020-2023)

This project is a collaboration with Dr. Natasha A. Webster and financed by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) for three years (2020–2023). 

The “gig” economy - one off (gigs) forms of employment via digital platforms - is growing in Sweden with immigrants making up much of its labor force. Gigs change working life and conditions through shifting employment forms while polarizing the labor force. This has potential impacts on the long-term integration of immigrants into Sweden's labor market. Swedish cities are relative newcomers to the gig economy, yet gig work is increasingly part of immigrant working lives. Gigs may bypass barriers, i.e. language or education mismatches, that migrants face in conventional work tenures. The rise of the Swedish gig economy has resulted in both research and policy gaps. This study addresses these gaps by asking: How is the gig economy organized and operationalized by worker-company relations in the Swedish context? How do immigrant gig workers in Sweden experience daily working life? How do we empirically understand current gaps in Swedish regulatory frameworks and the implications of those for enabling sustainable labor force participation of immigrant gig workers? Utilizing innovative qualitative methods, we study the gig economy at three scales - worker, company and structural frameworks - emphasizing gender and diversity. We unpack how the gig economy is utilized by immigrant groups, shaping working life and conditions while exposing inequalities. This research project has strong social relevance by addressing contemporary working life and integration in Sweden.

Recent publications:

Webster, N. A., Zhang, Q., Butler, O., Dissing Christensen, M., Duss, K., Floros, K., ... & Roelofsen, M. (2023). Thinking through digital mediations and spatialities of platform based work: A roundtable reflection. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1813354/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Zhang, Q., Webster, N. A., Han, S., & Ayele, W. Y. (2023). Contextualizing the rural in digital studies: A computational literature review of rural-digital relations. Technology in Society, 102373. Doi: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2023.102373

Webster, N.A., & Zhang, Q. (2022). Intersectional understandings of the role and meaning of platform-mediated work in the pandemic Swedish welfare state. Digital Geography and Society, 3, 100025, 1-13. doi: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2021.100025.

Webster, N.A., & Zhang, Q. (2021). Centering social-technical relations in studying platform urbanism: Intersectionality for just futures in European cities. Urban Transformations, 3(10), 1-7. doi: 10.1186/s42854-021-00027-z.

Previous projects

Platforming the rural? A cross-context exploration of digital rural spaces and practices (2021-2022)

This project is led by Qian Zhang, collaborated with Natasha A. Webster and Shengnan Han, and financed by the Fund for Strategic Investments at Stockholm University.

In this pilot study, we challenge the normative perspective of the urban in understanding the platform economy and advance conceptual discussions of rurality to ask: What is distinct about platform ruralism and how do (Swedish) rural digital practices and spaces illustrate this? We aim to map and understand the relationship between digital platforms, rural digital practices and changing rural social and economic life based on reviewing existing literature across relevant themes. The Swedish rural context is uniquely positioned to provide insights into understanding the implications of the platform economy because of 1) the exceptionally robust rural internet coverage, 2) a rich and diverse range of rural economic sectors from large industries to support for small businesses, and 3) strong rural governance and a welfare state system.

The study will contribute new interdisciplinary knowledge and methodologies for understanding how rural digital practices occur in specific social-spatial relations. This study will also contribute to new understandings of the meaning of rural spaces and places, and their positionings in the globalised digital age.

This study has been presented at the Nordic Geographers Meeting 2022 in Joensuu, Finland.

Unpacking spatial tensions: An interdisciplinary analysis of large-scale solar farm effects in drylands (2020-2022) 

This is a pilot exploration of large-scale solar farm effects in drylands from an interdisciplinary approach. It is collaborated with Ellen Bertell, Zhengyao Lu and Qiong Zhang in the project Simulating green Sahara with an earth system model, Swedish Research Council (VR, 2018-2021)

The study has been presented at the EGU General Assembly 2022.

New publication:

Zhang, Q., Berntell, E., Lu, Z., and Zhang, Q. (2022). Unpacking spatial tensions: An interdisciplinary analysis of large-scale solar farm effects in drylands, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-11740. doi: 10.5194/egusphere-egu22-11740.

Abstract: The last decades have seen rapid growth of renewable energy globally for accommodating the urgent need of mitigating climate change. Large-scale projects like solar farms are actively financed by transnational investors to get established in drylands like Sahara. The Earth-system model simulations on large-scale solar-farm scenarios show an increased regional rainfall and vegetation cover, analogue to a “green Sahara” that happened in the past. It will not only induce local climate and ecosystem changes but also prompt remote impacts globally through atmospheric teleconnections and ocean dynamics. This suggests that spatial tensions are inherent to climate change mitigation measures, where action in one place at a particular time impacts not only this place and the short time but place at distance and time in the future. Meanwhile, case studies in social sciences seem to suggest common unintended social consequences of the ongoing projects but no systematic assessment across these projects has been done. This study thus aims to pilot an interdisciplinary investigation of the multi-dimensional effects of large-scale renewable energy projects, mainly solar farms in drylands.

Unlocking the zero-lease puzzle in Swedish agricultural transformation

This is an ongoing study with Anders Wästfelt of the zero-lease phenomenon in Sweden. Our aim is to take this as an example to explore the role of globalisation, policy and farmer's decision-makings in shaping the change of agricultural land use nowadays. Thanks to the availability of Swedish lease statistics, we are able to combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the exploration. The following paper has been published and presented at the conference Re-scaling the Rural in Thy/Århus Denmark in May 2022. 

New publication:

Wästfelt, A., & Zhang, Q. (2022). Land without value? Unlocking the zero-lease puzzle in Swedish agricultural transformation. Geography Research Forum, 41: 108-136. https://grf.bgu.ac.il/index.php/GRF/article/view/612/529

Abstract: Contradictory and polarised processes dominate the shifting picture of agricultural landscape in Europe, where farmland abandonment, upscaling of farming, and scarcity of farmland, have been going on simultaneously in increasingly compressed spaces and at an intensified speed. These reflect the general puzzle in the globalised agriculture nowadays, questioning the availability and value of farmland. This paper focuses on unpacking one illustration of this farmland puzzle – the so called zero-lease phenomenon in Sweden, which is characterised by no transfer of money between landowners and users and has been captured in Swedish agricultural statistics since 1999. We examine this phenomenon through a theoretical lens which combines the views from rent theory, intensification and extensification in agricultural transformation, and historical institutional theory of land tenure. Through an empirical analysis focusing on mapping the geographical dimensions of the zero-lease, which include the scale of zero-lease fields, the geographical location of these fields at the farm and regional level, and the spatial variation of lease price, we argue zero lease has a strong geographical variation in Sweden and its spatial-temporal patterns closely follow the changing rhythm of agricultural restructuring processes over time. This Swedish example illustrates a methodological approach to locally identify how globally integrated markets force farmers to change – restructure, intensify or extensify. Ultimately, zero-lease can be seen as a farm-level adaptation in which farmers rely on farm geographies to cope – finding ways to adjust through spatial and temporal means – when old farming models no longer fit in the global agri-food systems.

Agents of Migration -A case study of the restaurant sector 

As part of the VR financed research project "Agents of Migration" (2018-2021) led by Dr. Linn Axelsson, this case study focuses on unpacking the role of intermediaries in the migration of Chinese workers in the Swedish restaurant sector. Our previous study (Axelsson et al 2013, 2017) and pilot study suggest that Chinese restaurant workers migrated to Sweden with varied assistance from two major types of intermediaries - recruitment agencies and social networks. Research in the growing new research field of migration intermediaries show that intermediaries organise, promote, facilitate and channel as well as filter and control labour mobilities. In this case study, we are interested in finding out how intermediaries have (re)shaped migration flows and trajectories of Chinese restaurant workers as well as how those intermediaries interact with the Swedish state with implications for (re)shaping the policy space. Results from this case study will also be used for comparative analysis with two other studies under the general project which focus on intermediaries in the IT and berrypicking sectors.

Immigrants, working life and the growing Swedish gig economy

This pilot study is in collaboration with Dr. Natasha A. Webster and has received a research grant from the research area Digital Humanities (DHV, Digital humanvetenskap) at Stockholm University (2019-2020).

Against the background of increasing debate over the gig economy, this research aims to explore the intersection of food mediated through digital platforms with integration, migrant precarity and public and private spaces. A pilot case study has focused on exploring immigrant women's daily working experiences within a food app platform.

Land tenure, peri-urban agriculture and agricultural geography

This project is collaborated with Prof. Anders Wästfelt.

A lot of research has been done on land tenure and an institutional approach is very strong among policy-makers. While international organisations and economists believe that clear land tenure is fundamental for promoting agricultural development, social scientists have shown that reforms for clarifying land ownership have raised unexpected conflicts in local communities. On the other hand, research suggests that land lease markets have become very common, which unfortunately are made use of by land grabbing activities and marginalise indigenous agricultural production.

So what is the role of land tenure in agricultural development? How can geography help to interpret its role? This research takes these questions to explore an empirical case from Sweden where the historical evolution of land tenure has established two types of leasehold arrangements with high protection of farmers' rights. The aim of the study is to explore the geographical perspective of land tenure in agricultural development. The Swedish practices may shed new lights on land reform policy-making. 

The work behind this article has partly been funded by the RETHINK project (Rethinking the links between farm modernisation, rural development and resilience in a world of increasing demands and finite resources).

Peri-urban agricultural transformations in Gothenburg, Sweden

The work behind this article has been funded by the RETHINK project (Rethinking the links between farm modernisation, rural development and resilience in a world of increasing demands and finite resources).

Pastoralists and the environmental state: A study of ecological resettlement in Inner Mongolia, China

This is my doctoral dissertation which received one of four awards for "distinguished scientific works 2014–2015" from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

The dissertation can be downloaded here.

Abstract: China's quest for sustainable development has given birth to a set of contested ‘ecological construction’ programmes. Focusing on ‘ecological resettlement’, a type of policy measure in a programme for restoring degraded grasslands, this thesis sets out a critical analysis in opposition to the dominant technical and managerial approaches to understanding environmentalisation. The aim is to draw out the politics of the formulation, implementation and effects of ecological resettlement at and across different scales. The study combines fieldwork, interviews, analysis of policy documents, and statistical analysis while theoretically, in addition to political ecology, it incorporates concepts and models from environmental governance, migration, and pastoralism studies. Environmentalisation is examined through three types of analysis: environmentalisation of the state, reshaping of state-society relations, and (re)territorialisation. A central theme is how local processes are linked to national considerations and how the local state acts as an intermediary between the central state and the pastoralists. The analysis exposes the practices that enabled the central state to define the problem of grasslands and devise interventions, illustrating the environmentalisation of the state. However, at the local level, incentives and interests defined by the political structure drove the developmental local state to pursue short-term-effective rather than sustainable practices. On the other hand, while the pastoral households responded to the projects with different strategies, their migration decisions suggested that social, economic and cultural considerations played a more important role than environmental concerns. Moreover, ecological resettlement has led to a significant change of Mongolian pastoralism. Land-tenure-based management further fragmented rangelands while the emergence of new social arrangements enabled migrant households to remain involved with pastoralism.

Chinese migrant workers in Sweden

Funded by the International Organization for Migration and led by Prof. Bo Malmberg, this project explored recent trends in Chinese labour migration to Sweden. In particular it examined the working conditions of Chinese chefs in Chinese-owned restaurants against the backdrop of Sweden’s new labour immigration policy and labour and employment law.

The project report can be downloaded here.

Journal Reviewer

Agriculture and Human Values

Current Anthropology

Environment, Development and Sustainability

Emotion, Space and Society

Forum for Development Studies

Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography

Globalizations

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Nordic Journal of Migration Research

Political Geography

Rural Sociology

Sustainability

World Development

Professional Memberships

China-Europe Research Platform on Chinese Migration to and beyond Europe (CERPE)

European Geosciences Union (EGU)

ICARDC Network on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (ICARDC)

Swedish Development Research Network (SweDev)

The International Network on Displacement and Resettlement (INDR)

The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG)

Appointments

2021 –     Co-convenor of the Post-COST Drylands Action Forum

2018 – 2021  Sweden-representative of the EU COST Action (CA16233) “Drylands Facing Change: Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Change, Food Insecurity, Political Instability”.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Thinking through digital mediations and spatialities of platform based work: A roundtable reflection

  2023. Natasha A. Webster (et al.).

  Report

  This paper is a unique roundtable discussion between geographers to explore, contextualizeand problematize the role of geography in the gig economy. It brings together eight researchersfrom across Europe all working with qualitative methods and studying the gig economy. Basedon reflections and commentaries regarding the spatialities and temporalities in and of the gigeconomy, we offer an innovative approach to exploring complicated factors in an emerging andrapidly growing field. We highlight the multiple layers of geography in physical and digitalspaces and the, sometimes blurry, interactions between these. We also show howtemporalities shape the geographies of the gig economy. This paper contributes to developing,deepening and advancing theoretical challenges in understanding the gig economy. It alsobrings these challenges into an accessible, yet thorough publication that can be used inteaching about the gig economy and digital geography. We provide a pedagogical tool tosupport university teachers in using this document in their courses.

  Read more about Thinking through digital mediations and spatialities of platform based work

• Contextualizing the rural in digital studies: A computational literature review of rural-digital relations

  2023. Qian Zhang (et al.). Technology in society 75

  Article

  Digital technologies are changing how and where we live, work and socialize. Rural areas are distinctive spaces and places but in the current debates of new digital phenomena, digital spaces and practices risk not being contextualized with sensitivities to rural geographies. This study aims to map how digital has been examined to date in rural-focused studies, and accordingly present propositions for how rural-digital studies can be sensitive to the distinctive and diverse character of rural spaces and places. We conduct a two-stage/scale literature review, combining 1) computational topic modelling from a Global Dataset (459 article abstracts) with 2) qualitative content analysis from a sub-dataset focusing on the Nordic region (Nordic Sub-Dataset, 17 full articles). We begin with a topic modelling analysis generating ten major themes (topics) leading to an overview of how research areas are connected to the meaning of rural context. Turning to the Nordic region, as an in-depth example, we illustrate the complexity of rural digital geographies, through a qualitative content analysis. This demonstrates that digital in rural contexts are primarily positioned outwardly as social/regional development and business/economy, and less situated inwardly through individual experience and community building. Combined we show a wide spectrum of rural-digital relations but demonstrate that rural contexts in rural-digital relations need more attention. We propose three propositions to invite deeper rural contextualizations in future digital studies to uphold the importance of rural spaces and places through, by and with digital geography.

  Read more about Contextualizing the rural in digital studies

• Understanding the spatiality of the rural poor's livelihoods in Northeast China: Geographical context, location and urban hierarchy

  2023. Li Ma (et al.). Applied Geography 152

  Article

  The livelihoods approach has become dominant for understanding poverty issues and advising on development policies. Spatial perspectives have been increasingly recognised to be important for understanding the increasing complexity and dynamics of livelihoods with regional development, urbanisation and close rural-urban interactions. This study further develops this perspective by highlighting the concepts of geographical context, location and urban hierarchy and adopts a multi-scalar analytical approach. The study examines the rural poor's livelihood strategies in Jilin Province of China based on two surveys conducted with about 3000 households in total and multiple logistic regression analysis. Our results demonstrate that half of the rural poor depend on incomes and livelihood strategies without labour input. From a macro-spatial view, the rural poor living in the Western and Eastern Areas, which have more challenging geographical contexts, are more dependent on subsidy income. From a micro-spatial view, rural livelihoods change, with spatial patterns depending on distance to urban areas and the type of these areas; small and medium-sized urban areas are more important for the rural poor's livelihoods. Geographical context makes these urban effects on rural livelihoods spatially more heterogeneous. Spatial understandings of livelihoods research help to better target and tailor poverty alleviation policies.

  Read more about Understanding the spatiality of the rural poor's livelihoods in Northeast China

• Drylands connected: Mobile communication and changing power positions in (nomadic) pastoral societies

  2022. Mirjam De Bruijn (et al.). Drylands Facing Change, 193-211

  Chapter

  The new connectivity, through mobile phones, social media, and wireless internet, is an agent in social change in the drylands. In this chapter, we present four case studies: the introduction of mobile apps in Mongolia and Kenya, the role of mobile telephony in the Sahel, and the introduction of online learning in the Negev Desert. Each of these case studies develops an argument around the role of connectivity in ‘giving a voice’ to the people living in drylands. Indeed, as the studies show, the new technology of communication is a resource for such populations, especially when we focus on the benefits of improved communication and access to information. However, the effective use of such a resource is hampered by the lack of knowledge of dryland dynamics among the developers of the new technology and by the imposed power relations of the State. Also, the technology may follow its own pathway, being appropriated by the population in unexpected ways and creating new power relations that may also lead to conflict.

  Read more about Drylands connected

• Intersectional understandings of the role and meaning of platform-mediated work in the pandemic Swedish welfare state

  2022. Natasha A. Webster, Qian Zhang. Digital Geography and Society 3

  Article

  Digitally-mediated forms of services are increasingly normalized and rapidly transforming working and everyday lives creating new digital-social-spatial relations. The platform economy, in particular, offers new ways of work and new means of consumption. These changes challenge welfare states, both in the operations of institutions and to their foundational social goals and values. In Sweden, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social and labour market segregation intersected and amplified inequalities resulting in media covering and querying the nature and role of platform-mediated work within the Swedish welfare context. Located within an intersectional perspective, this study explores how media articulations of platform-mediated work shape theoretical understandings of the platform economy during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. This was conducted through an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of Swedish-language newspapers between January and September 2020 (96 articles). We show understandings of the platform economy are active and shifting in temporal and spatial contexts. We highlight how work and working forms tie closely to ideas of equality and welfare in the Swedish context. Intersectional perspectives reveal the central role of power structures in local context – a specific time/place- and decenters normative economic perspectives of the platform economy. This study reinforces the need for more studies on the platform economy that foreground social relations to understand inequalities produced in and through social-technological activities. 

  Read more about Intersectional understandings of the role and meaning of platform-mediated work in the pandemic Swedish welfare state

• Land without Value? Unlocking the Zero Lease Puzzle in Swedish Agricultural Transformation

  2022. Anders Wästfelt, Zhang Qian. Geographical Research Forum 41, 73-94

  Article

  This paper investigates the drivers and mechanisms behind the zero lease phenomenon in Sweden, which is characterised by no monetary transfer between landowners and land users, and has been captured in agricultural statistics since the late 1990s. The phenomenon is examined through a theoretical framework which combines rent theory with geographical and historically contextualised views of farming and farmland tenure. We use rent statistics but focus on exploring the geographical dimensions of zero lease farmland in Sweden, mapping spatial variations of rents, the scale of free-leased fields and the geographical location of these fields both at the farm and regional level. Our results show how the zero lease is related to geographical space and ongoing transformation processes in agriculture and rural spaces over time. The paper concludes that the zero lease creates a temporal flexibility for landowners, preserves non-monetary landscape values, and creates opportunities for future farming by preserving landesque capital. This Swedish example illustrates well how, when globally integrated markets force farmers to either restructure, intensify or extensify, and old farming models do not fit the global agri-food systems, farmers find ways to adjust through spatial and temporal means. Seeing the zero lease through farm geographies may suggest opportunities and solutions for making an alternative food and farming future.

  Read more about Land without Value? Unlocking the Zero Lease Puzzle in Swedish Agricultural Transformation

• Making cities in drylands: Migration, livelihoods, and policy

  2022. Nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe, Qian Zhang, Ahmed Alhuseen. Drylands Facing Change, 174-192

  Chapter

  Throughout history, urban centres have existed at the margins of drylands. Nowadays they are expanding in connection to new local, national, and global contexts. Rich research on the urbanization–migration relationship, especially in Africa and Asia, has not given much attention to dryland cities, while emerging research suggests that climate change effects entangled with conflicts in resource use are driving or displacing people to dryland cities. Drawing on livelihoods and translocal perspectives that centralize human agency in (re)producing places and shaping relations between places through migration/mobilities, this chapter explores the driving forces behind the growth of dryland cities and the contribution of rural–urban migration to this process. Our two empirical cases—Khartoum in Sudan and Inner Mongolia in China—demonstrate that dryland cities have been produced simultaneously through migrants’ bottom-up actions, changing human–environment relationships, and shifting policy. Urban growth in drylands is nurtured by resources in the rural area through the mediation of migrants, which calls for research to look beyond the urban–rural dichotomy. Despite following some general characteristics and development directions, the dynamics of dryland cities are shaped by particular environmental and geographical characteristics of the drylands, which are associated with rural migrants’ more flexible and opportunistic but less settled relationships to the cities.

  Read more about Making cities in drylands

• Unpacking spatial tensions: An interdisciplinary analysis of large-scale solar farm effects in drylands

  2022. Qian Zhang (et al.).

  Conference

  The last decades have seen rapid growth of renewable energy globally for accommodating the urgent need of mitigating climate change. Large-scale projects like solar farms are actively financed by transnational investors to get established in drylands like Sahara. The Earth-system model simulations on large-scale solar-farm scenarios show an increased regional rainfall and vegetation cover, analogue to a “green Sahara” that happened in the past. It will not only induce local climate and ecosystem changes but also prompt remote impacts globally through atmospheric teleconnections and ocean dynamics. This suggests that spatial tensions are inherent to climate change mitigation measures, where action in one place at a particular time impacts not only this place and the short time but place at distance and time in the future. Meanwhile, case studies in social sciences seem to suggest common unintended social consequences of the ongoing projects but no systematic assessment across these projects has been done. This study thus aims to pilot an interdisciplinary investigation of the multi-dimensional effects of large-scale renewable energy projects, mainly solar farms in drylands. Our literature review of the social effects across solar farms and other major types of renewable energy projects shows that, local host communities widely bear adverse social consequences from these projects despite there are benefits at regional, national, and transnational levels. Economic redistribution and social differentiation rapidly occur through land acquisition, livelihoods, compensation, and development programs, further dividing local communities and amplifying inequalities. These social effects could be further complicated by the likely local climate and ecosystem changes as shown by our Earth-system model simulations. Based on this combined analysis, we conclude that spatial tensions in the current climate change mitigation measures challenge the assumption of global common goods and the reach of global justices. We urge interdisciplinary research to combine their different expertise for developing integrated conceptual and methodological models, for better understanding the intersected effects of renewable energy projects on drylands, and for advising fair and just climate mitigation policy and measures.

  Read more about Unpacking spatial tensions

• Centering social-technical relations in studying platform urbanism: intersectionality for just futures in European cities

  2021. Natasha A. Webster, Qian Zhang. Urban Transformations 3 (1)

  Article

  Platform-based services are rapidly transforming urban work, lives and spaces around the world. The rise of platforms dependent on largely expendable labour relations, with significant migrant involvement, must be seen as connected, and as replicating larger social processes rather than merely technological changes. This perspective paper urgently calls for an intersectional perspective to better understand social-technical relations crossing the digital-urban interface of platform urbanism in contemporary European cities. Critics of platforms and gig work, to date, have mainly focused on algorithms-based social control, degraded working conditions, problematic employment relations and precariousness of gig work. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has both disrupted and amplified these issues, intensifying the vulnerability of gig workers. For example, in Sweden, migrant groups and gig workers were separately identified as being hardest hit by Covid, but with little attention to the interconnectivity between these categories, nor to how these groups are co-positioned vis-a-vis larger socio-economic inequalities. Thus, we argue for a deeper understanding of the social processes underlying platforms and for active investigation of how inequalities are being produced and/or maintained in/by these processes. Urban planners, designers and policy makers will need to actively address the hybrid (digital and physical) urban spaces produced in platform urbanism in order to prevent spatial and economic inequalities. We argue for a stronger recognition of interrelated and overlapping social categories such as gender and migrant status as central to the construction of mutually constitutive systems of oppression and discrimination produced in and through the platform urbanism.

  Read more about Centering social-technical relations in studying platform urbanism

• Channelling through bureaucracy: How migration intermediaries and state actors (re)shape Chinese migration to the Swedish restaurant industry

  2021. Qian Zhang, Linn Axelsson. Geoforum 123, 14-22

  Article

  The role of migration mediation in the global circulation of labour has been receiving increasing attention. Channel is a frequently used, but under-theorised, concept in such studies. Drawing on mobilities perspectives, especially migration infrastructure and three aspects of mobility (route, speed and friction), this paper fosters a framework – channelling through bureaucracy. It seeks to go beyond seeing channels as structure and mechanism to argue channelling is a productive and differentiating process whereby both state and intermediary actors actively intervene in migrants’ mobilities. Based on documentary analysis, interviews and participatory observation in Sweden and China, we demonstrate how, in the last decade, migration intermediaries and state actors channel Chinese migrants’ mobilities in relation to three major shifts in Swedish immigration bureaucracy. The empirical findings illustrate that, as a concept, channelling illustrates, specifically, how conflicts and collaborations between the regulatory and commercial dimensions of migration mediation drive new modes of operation and self-reinforcing of migration infrastructures. Additionally, the study indicates how channelling operates through these three specific aspects of mobility to include, exclude, favour, disadvantage, filter and direct different intermediary actors and migrants. Future research could draw on mobilities studies and the specific forms of interactions between state actors and migration intermediaries to deepen the understanding of migration mediation.

  Read more about Channelling through bureaucracy

• Re-visiting the ‘black box’ of migration: State-intermediary co-production of regulatory spaces of labour migration

  2021. Linn Axelsson (et al.). Journal of ethnic and migration studies

  Article

  It is now widely held that a variety of intermediary actors, including recruitment and staffing agencies, multinational corporations and local brokers, shape labour migration. This paper argues that in order to better understand the global circulation of labour it is necessary to explore the involvement of these actors in the production of the regulatory spaces through which migrant labour is brokered. Indeed, migration intermediaries do not only navigate borders on behalf of their migrant clients. Nor is ‘the state’ primarily a backdrop against which the understanding of the role of intermediaries may be developed. Instead, we argue, regulatory spaces of labour migration are made and remade through direct and indirect exchanges and interactions between intermediaries and state actors. Through an analysis of three moments of regulatory change in Sweden, the paper shows that such interaction does not take place in an even landscape but, rather, that the ability of migration intermediaries to influence the regulation of migration lies in the capacity to form close relationships or establish a powerful presence. A focus on the dynamic co-production of regulatory spaces by intermediaries and state actors, in our view, offers a more nuanced account of how labour migration currently is brokered and regulated.

  Read more about Re-visiting the ‘black box’ of migration

• Careers Delivered from the Kitchen? Immigrant Women Small-scale Entrepreneurs Working in the Growing Nordic Platform Economy

  2020. Natasha A. Webster, Qian Zhang. NORA 28 (2), 113-125

  Article

  In Sweden, several trends intersect: the gig economy is growing rapidly; immigrants find it challenging to find work; and integration policies increasingly focus on the role of the first job as a benchmark for integration. This empirical study inserts an intersectional perspective into the exploration of the gig economy by examining immigrant women’s daily working experiences within a transactional gig platform, “Yummy”. This food app links home-based chefs to public consumers through online ordering systems. Through in-depth interviews with chefs, the app management team and participatory observations at firm training sessions and food festivals, we explore the complexity of gendered and racialized precarious work from inside the gig economy to consider daily gig life from a feminist economics perspective. The study shows the gig economy does provide entrepreneurial opportunities for new immigrants with these being based on gendered norms. We demonstrate how gendered narratives of idle capacities and women’s work in the home and family spheres are marketized and transformed through the platform. Our study widens the scope of understanding the gig economy by positioning gig work as part of broader social relations between a company, the workers and gender norms.

  Read more about Careers Delivered from the Kitchen? Immigrant Women Small-scale Entrepreneurs Working in the Growing Nordic Platform Economy

• Reconstruction of cropland change in North China Plain Area over the past 300 years

  2019. Xueqiong Wei (et al.). Global and Planetary Change 176, 60-70

  Article

  Land use and land cover change (LUCC) is not only a vital form of global change, but through biogeophysical and biogeochemical mechanisms, it also has a strong impact on the global and regional climate and environment change. The existing historical LUCC datasets still have many uncertainties that cause errors in climate and environment simulations. Reconstruction of historical LUCC on the regional scale is essential for improving the precision of global and national LUCC. In this study, we combined existing datasets with historical statistics and survey data to reconstruct cropland change in North China Plain Area over the past 300 years. Following systematic steps, a range of original methods from data sources and methods comparison, data re-calibration, time slices selection, data supplement, to cropland area fraction calculation were used. The cropland area at the county level was allocated into grid cells of 10 km × 10 km so as to achieve a high spatial resolution and precision. The results show that the cropland area change in North China Plain Area can be classified into two main stages: steady increase before 1954 and rapid decrease after 1954. The spatial distribution of cropland change over the past 300 years corresponded to the patterns of the total cropland change in North China Plain Area. From the late 17th century to the 1980s, the cropland area fraction in the plains increased and the cropland expanded to the hilly and coastal areas gradually. After that, the cropland area fraction in the plains decreased, especially in the southeastern of North China Plain Area. The total cropland area in North China Plain Area of our study is close to the results of most previous studies but the maps generated based on our dataset present local difference of cropland distribution more clearly than a recent important global dataset HYDE3.2. Our dataset of cropland area at 10 km × 10 km grid scale can also be used directly in climate and environment simulations to improve the data precision in North China Plain Area.

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• Internal and international migration dynamics in China

  2018. Qian Zhang, Xiaoyi Wang. Handbook of Migration and Globalisation, 297-317

  Chapter

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• Keeping agriculture alive next to the city – The functions of the land tenure regime nearby Gothenburg, Sweden

  2018. Anders Wästfelt, Qian Zhang. Land use policy 78, 447-459

  Article

  Sustaining food production close to cities is not easy, as farming is often much less profitable compared to other activities in such locations, and it is at the frontier of resisting the pressures from urbanization and globalization. This study looks into an underexplored issue in peri-urban agriculture research – the role that land lease can play for preserving peri-urban agriculture. Leasing has increasingly become a common praxis in the Western industrialized world and it is a very necessary means for accessing limited farmland especially in peri-urban areas. Focusing on farms near Gothenburg, this study explores how the spatial structure of leasing brings opportunities as well as constraints to the change and continuation of farming in this peri-urban area. The investigation is guided by social, spatial and functional conceptualizations of land tenure, which 1) consider land tenure as a social relation, 2) are centered on functional constraints for agricultural production, and 3) highlight the spatial effects. Based on a combination of map interpretations, statistical analysis and interview analysis, the results show a strong and spatially structured pattern of production, farm and land use changes. Agriculture shows mainly to be driven by the landowner’s leasing strategies but is also shaped by the interplays between the landowner and the leasehold farmers. Existing food production farms have been able to rely on adding land from side lease for development even though the increase of small horse farms, holding whole-farm leases, makes it hard for new food production farms to start up. Policymakers are recommended to strategically use long-term leases as a policy instrument on municipal land at the peri-urban location, to incentivize food production farmers as well as to reduce land management costs.

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• Managing sandstorms through resettling pastoralists in China: how multiple forms of power govern the environment at/across scales

  2018. Qian Zhang. Journal of political ecology 25 (1), 364-380

  Article

  This study uses concepts of power and 'scaled politics' to analyze the effects of environmentalization and technocratic and market-based measures in China. Political scientists have explored the politics behind the proactive engagement of the Chinese state in governing the environment since the 2000s, also drawing on political ecology. Based on policy document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates a case of ecological resettlement in Inner Mongolia by examining how this became a new solution to desertification and rangeland degradation. The article shows how resettlement was implemented through multi-scalar practices and the reconfiguration of spatial relations, and why pastoral households responded to resettlement in certain ways. The state turned certain areas and people (associated with overgrazing) into subjects of governance. By distinguishing the different strategies used by central and local government, the analysis shows that disciplinary and neoliberal environmentality are associated with scalar practices between the state and the people, and within the state system. Neoliberal environmentality, however, counteracts the making of environmental subjects and encounters resistance. Sovereign environmentality is still deployed as a means to control local government and the obedience of herders. Pastoralists resist this, depending on their different subjectivities. The study advances our understanding of the multiple governmentality perspective, its analytics, and scalar processes.

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• On waiting, work-time and imagined futures: Theorizing temporal precariousness among Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry

  2017. Linn Axelsson, Bo Malmberg, Qian Zhang. Geoforum 78, 169-178

  Article

  This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden – a country considered to have one of Europe’s most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal ‘waiting zones’ indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers’ imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting – for a return to China or settlement in Sweden – may be part of migrants’ strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories. 

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• Reclaiming localisation for revitalising agriculture: A case study of peri-urban agricultural change in Gothenburg, Sweden

  2016. Anders Wästfelt, Qian Zhang. Journal of Rural Studies 47, 172-185

  Article

  Agriculture near urban landscapes has recently been re-appreciated with the recognition of its economic, social and environmental contributions. However, rapid urbanisation and global agricultural restructuring constituting complex processes across multiple scales tend to threaten the survival of peri-urban agriculture. Focusing on family farms near Gothenburg in Sweden, this paper intends to explore the. relations between location and agriculture and how family farms have been able to continue farming in peri-urban areas. Unlike previous studies of peri-urban agriculture, mostly carried out by planners from an urban-centric perspective, this paper deploys a rural and place-based perspective by drawing on theories of agricultural location. Based on statistical and spatial analyses of land use change, and interviews with farmers and authorities, the processes and drivers of local agricultural change are analysed. The results identify four simultaneous processes that produce the diversity in forms of agriculture between farms: structural changes, loss of farmland to urban expansion, specialisation of on-farm activities and a niching trend of on-farm activities. The new findings which shed light on the theory of agricultural localisation are: 1) niche production greatly takes advantage of the pea-urban location; 2) a reverse von Thunen's transportation pattern is enabled by the proximity to urban consumers; 3) enhancing competitive advantage through saving labour costs is enabled by the direct relation to consumers at the peri-urban location; 4) multifunctional agriculture has potential but also raises conflicts between different types of land use in ped-urban areas; 5) a secured access to land for farmers enabled by the local governance which separates the increasing land value from land rent is fundamental for supporting continued peri-urban agriculture. Our recommendation is that policy makers need to shift to a location-sensitive governing praxis of agriculture in order to re-vitalise pea-urban areas.

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• Reconstruction of cropland change over the past 300 years in the Jing-Jin-Ji area, China

  2016. Xueqiong Wei (et al.). Regional Environmental Change 16 (7), 2097-2109

  Article

  Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) has strongly influenced the global and regional climate and environmental change, especially over the last three centuries. Accurate reconstruction of historical LUCC is a key step for assessing the impact of LUCC on global environmental change. To fill in the gap of regional historical cropland reconstruction in North China and achieve a better understanding of the historical cropland change process, in this paper we reconstruct cropland change at the county level over the past 300 years in the Jing-Jin-Ji (Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei) area, China. The reconstruction is based on sources including gazetteers, statistics and survey documents, and the methods are composed of data calibration, data interpolation and correlation analysis of data. The results show that the cropland change in the Jing-Jin-Ji area fluctuated, which can be classified into five stages: rapid increase in 1677–1755 and 1916–1950, slight growth in 1755–1884, gentle decline in 1884–1916 and rapid decrease after 1950. Two peak values appeared in 1884 and 1950. The spatial distribution of cropland in the Jing-Jin-Ji area kept a steady expansion and the majority of cropland concentrated on the plain before 1911. After this, the spatial distribution of cropland became more even and there was a rapid increase in the eastern coastal region and the northern hilly region. After 1985, the Jing-Jin-Ji area has experienced rapid urbanization and cultivation ratios in most counties declined, especially in Beijing municipality. Our dataset of the cropland area at the county level can contribute to improving the precision of the global and national land-use and land-cover datasets.

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• Methods for cropland reconstruction based on gazetteers in the QingDynasty (1644-1911): a case study in Zhili province, China

  2015. Xueqiong Wei (et al.). Applied Geography 65, 82-92

  Article

  The accuracy of historical land use/land cover change (LUCC) reconstruction on the regional scale isfundamental for global change research. In this study, based on gazetteers, we developed a methodologicalframework. It follows the steps including 1) collecting the land tax payment records which hadinformation on cropland and calculating the total registered cropland data in each county; 2) validatingthe registered land data based on the understanding of the traditional Chinese principles of landassessment; 3) selecting the time slices which obtain as many counties with cropland data as possibleand 4) interpolating the missing data based on their temporal and spatial distribution, to produce thecropland dataset at the county level in 1677, 1755 and 1884 in Zhili province (including the currentadministrative territory of Beijing municipality, Tianjin municipality, most of Hebei province and a fewparts of Henan province, Shangdong province, Liaoning Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region).In comparison, our cropland data is close to most of the other researchers' and its spatial resolutionis improved. The developed methods were reliable and could be applied to improve the precision of theexisting LUCC datasets and could be used to study regional climate and environment simulations.

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• Pastoralists and the Environmental State: A study of ecological resettlement in Inner Mongolia, China

  2015. Qian Zhang.

  Thesis (Doc)

  China's quest for sustainable development has given birth to a set of contested ‘ecological construction’ programmes. Focusing on ‘ecological resettlement’, a type of policy measure in a programme for restoring degraded grasslands, this thesis sets out a critical analysis in opposition to the dominant technical and managerial approaches to understanding environmentalisation. The aim is to draw out the politics of the formulation, implementation and effects of ecological resettlement at and across different scales. The study combines fieldwork, interviews, analysis of policy documents, and statistical analysis while theoretically, in addition to political ecology, it incorporates concepts and models from environmental governance, migration, and pastoralism studies. Environmentalisation is examined through three types of analysis: environmentalisation of the state, reshaping of state-society relations, and (re)territorialisation. A central theme is how local processes are linked to national considerations and how the local state acts as an intermediary between the central state and the pastoralists. The analysis exposes the practices that enabled the central state to define the problem of grasslands and devise interventions, illustrating the environmentalisation of the state. However, at the local level, incentives and interests defined by the political structure drove the developmental local state to pursue short-term-effective rather than sustainable practices. On the other hand, while the pastoral households responded to the projects with different strategies, their migration decisions suggested that social, economic and cultural considerations played a more important role than environmental concerns. Moreover, ecological resettlement has led to a significant change of Mongolian pastoralism. Land-tenure-based management further fragmented rangelands while the emergence of new social arrangements enabled migrant households to remain involved with pastoralism.

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• Chinese restaurant workers in Sweden: policies, patterns and social consequences

  2013. Linn Axelsson (et al.).

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• Post-pastoralism? Pastoralists living with ecological resettlement

  2013. Qian Zhang. Pastoralism in Contemporary China, 299-332

  Chapter

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• The Dilemma of Conserving Rangeland by Means of Development: Exploring Ecological Resettlement in a Pastoral Township of Inner Mongolia

  2012. Qian Zhang. Nomadic Peoples 16 (1), 88-115

  Article

  In the last decade environmental policies, particularly ecological resettlement, have changed China's pastoral areas. This paper explores the difficulty in conserving rangeland through ecological resettlement. The paper focuses on how ecological resettlement policy has been translated into practice, and how the affected people responded with migration decisions. Empirical findings in a pastoral township in Inner Mongolia demonstrate that local politicians have used the projects to stress economic restructuring, promotion of non-farming activities and urbanization. Meanwhile, affected households haved used migration strategies to adapt to the changing economic and social environments rather than the changing natural environment. The difficulty of conserving rangelands and the marginalization of environmental concerns is a result of locally defined modernization development interests and the affected households' adaptive behaviours.

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• Case Study Report for the EACH-FOR Project

  2010. Qian Zhang. Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios

  Chapter

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• Mongolie intérieure. Désertification, migration et transformation des modes de vie.

  2010. Qian Zhang. Hommes et migrations 2 (1284), 42-55

  Article

  En Mongolie intérieure, le gouvernement chinois a engagé la lutte contre la désertification des steppes et la dégradation des terres. Depuis une dizaine d’années, il encourage la migration et la sédentarisation des éleveurs nomades en milieu urbain. Sur le terrain, si les subventions de l’État poussent certains à partir en laissant derrière eux leurs terres, d’autres restent profondément attachés à leur mode de vie. Mais les méthodes traditionnelles de gestion de l’espace, comme la transhumance, sont de plus en plus coûteuses et ne répondent plus aux règles du développementéconomique.

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• Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios: Case Study Report on China (Inner Mongolia)

  2009. Qian Zhang.

  Report

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