Call for Applications

The University of Sydney China Studies Centre is organising the second graduate workshop under our multidisciplinary research agenda China in the Urban Age. The workshop theme is Health, Food and Waste in the Chinese City: practical, utopian and systemic solutions, seeking to include contributions from any branch of the sciences, humanities and social sciences.

The urban age in China has been an age of waste and excess. Waste happens at the point of production and consumption, from sometimes honest efforts that do not consider the unexpected consequences, but also from the dominance of short-term solutions aimed at maximising profit. More is often seen as better – more value, more efficiency, more popularity. But when is it excess? Such values as waste, profit, excess, surplus, all warrant reconsideration, in turn reframing concepts of technology, development and progress. These questions are of historical and contemporary relevance to societies everywhere, so what can China learn from other contexts, and what can they learn from China?