Agenda

16 Dec 2025 17:30

Lie-Flat Environmentalism in a Burning World

Polo Didattico San Basilio, Aula MF4 Salizada San Basegio, Magazzino 5, Dorsoduro Area Portuale, Venezia

Lie-Flat Environmentalism in a Burning World

Yifei Li
New York University, Dept.of Environmental Studies

Abstract

While the Chinese state continuously orchestrates a global image of “ecological civilization,” curating a monopoly on environmental aesthetics and expertise to position itself as the sole agent of transformation, the resonance of this project among ordinary citizens reveals a fractured landscape of engagement. This paper identifies the emergence of lie-flat environmentalism: a posture of calibrated withdrawal characterized by scientific agnosticism, an embrace of conspiracy, and a profound disenchantment with grassroots climate action. This disengagement is not a failure of mobilization but a form of quiet politics: a sophisticated refusal to perform state-sanctioned green citizenship in the face of political constriction and the affective burdens of a burning world. By foregrounding these thick, longitudinal narratives, the analysis demonstrates how authoritarian environmental governance paradoxically produces practices of retreat, revealing socio-ecological transformation not as a monolithic state project, but as an uneven, contested process.

Bio

Yifei Li is a Global Network Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University. He is an ethnographer, researching and writing on the theory and practice of environmental authoritarianism, with a primary empirical emphasis on China. He is the lead author (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Polity, 2020) and co-editor (with Chris Coggins) of the Handbook on China and the Environment (Sage, 2026). His scholarly work has been featured on NPR, in The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Le Monde, among others.

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

NICHE, DSAAM, Erasmus+

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