FU XIYAO

PhD Student

Email: e0191972@u.nus.edu

Research Title: Dynamic Relationships between Biodiversity and Cultural Diversity at the Border Landscape of Southeast Asia and Southwest China
Research Group: Tropical Environmental Change (TEC) & Politics, Economies And Space (PEAS)
Thesis Advisor: Prof David Taylor
Co-thesis Advisor: Dr Nathan Green

My doctoral research focuses on the dynamic relationships between biodiversity and cultural diversity at the border landscape of Southwest China and Southeast Asia. Drawing from both political ecology and cultural politics, I examine the evolving human-plant relationships among indigenous communities amidst agrarian transformations. Four interconnected questions guide my research design: 1) What does biodiversity conservation mean in the livelihoods and worldviews of ethnic minority farmers? 2) How do ethnic foodways embody environmental change and cultural resistance? 3) How are global production networks translated into local human-plant relations? 4) How do different ethnic minorities deploy biocultural diversity to build resilience under climate change? I will embed these questions in three critical contexts—state territorialization, climate change, and indigenous history—and address them with a mixed methodology rooted in long-term ethnography.

Prior to this, I was first drawn to the socio-cultural roots of environmental problems as an Environmental Studies major at Yale-NUS College. I then obtained a Master of Environmental Science degree at Yale University, specializing in environmental anthropology. My Master’s thesis research has taken me to live and learn with ethnic minority farmers at the Yunnan-Myanmar border about in-situ seed conservation in their livelihoods and rituals.