Youjin Chung
Congratulations to Youjin Chung, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management and the Energy and Resources Group, on receiving the 2025 Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Book Award from the American Association for Geographers.
The award recognizes authors at any stage in their careers whose writing in political ecology is both innovative and has the potential to become foundational to CAPE’s relevant areas of research. Chung earned the award for her latest book, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures, which traces the lived experiences of rural women and men following an attempt to privatize and enclose a large tract of land in coastal Tanzania during the mid-2000s.
“Chung tells the interlocking stories through the voices of those who will be dispossessed and, to some extent, of those who are facilitating dispossession,” the nomination read, highlighting her unique approach and subject matter. “It is an original and important contribution to the land grabbing literature that brings complexity, new theorization, and feminist epistemological methods to an expanding field."
For the book, Chung spoke to individuals and families who had to rethink and negotiate their everyday survival strategies after they had their crops uprooted, houses burned down, farm tools stolen, and confrontations with paramilitary groups intensified.
“People compared living in the shadow of this project to living with one foot in and one foot out,” she said during a faculty book panel last spring. “It was like living in parentheses, or a cage, or like refugees on their own land and in their own nation.”
Learn more about Chung’s research in this recent Breakthroughs magazine feature.