Sheng Long’s work focuses on environmental justice in numerical governance: 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 geographic and legal data in national reforms and everyday agriculture. It examines the contribution and vulnerability of rural landholders in the state’s statistical governance of land belonging and 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.
