Sheng Long’s work focuses on environmental justice in the age of big data: how people quantify farmland, vegetation, and climate, in ways that resonate with urban-rural development disparities, social stratification conflicts, and gender inequalities in statistical engagement. Her first manuscript project, Numbering Land: Ethical Measures of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms, is an ethnography of environmental data in national reforms and everyday agriculture. It examines the contribution and vulnerability of rural landholders in the state’s statistical governance of agrarian resources. The work thematizes numbers as an unsettling actor in both routine life and techno-scientific projects, questioning the power dynamics in technologies invented by government and giant corporations. This research was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Sheng continues exploring environmental data justice in her second research project, tentatively titled Calculating Weather: The Bargain of Climate Adversities in Agricultural Insurance. The project seeks to analyze how fruit growers in Southeast China come into conflict with the government and the insurance companies in formulating new ways of measuring climate adversities in agricultural production.
