Members

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou has been writing, theorizing, and researching organic farming literature and culture as a re-worlding practice since 2005. She is currently working on her monograph on transpacific agricultural literary environmentalism while growing chives, asparagus, mulberries, and gourds sustainability at her office eco-rooftop garden in Taipei along with 23 colleagues in the Farm for Change project. This community farm that she and her team founded in 2019 is called Chung Chung Kan (種種看) or, literally, “let's try to farm.” Farming in Taiwan's most prestigious research center as perpetual beginners, Chung Chung Kan is becoming a radical site that aims to test out popular understandings of “organic,” “cultivation,” “urban farming, and “farming as spirituality.” Chung Chung Kan participants are also encouraging words and themes that embody the ethos and tactics of world-building and care-giving practices.

Email: sschou.academia@gmail.com

Website: www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/people/Serena-Chou.aspx

Chien-Yi Lu’s research interests include climate change, neoliberalism, democracy, inequality, politics of EU, and animal rights. Her book Surviving Democracy: Mitigating Climate Change in a Neoliberalized World (Routledge, 2020) places neoliberalism at the center of our ecological plight. She is a Podcaster and an op-ed writer. Without a green thumb, she is not gardening at Chung Chung Kan. However, she tries her best to be a "good ancestor" by reducing plane rides and animal consumption to close to zero. More importantly, her activism is grounded in her research, which traces the root cause of the deterioration of both democracy and the environment by unpacking the neoliberalized social, economic and political structure. She is currently examining how fascism gains grounds as the dominant organizing logic of society as neoliberalism bows out, and how degrowth might be a plausible counterforce that keeps civilization from plunging into an ecological as well as political dystopia. Other than being the mom of Niu Niu, a street dog she rescued 15 years ago, she has helped bettering the lives of romaning animals for over a decade by mainstreaming neutering (rather than culling) as the more effective and humane way of population control.

Email: chienyilu@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Website: www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/people/Chien-Yi-Lu.aspx

I am a social demographer specializing in health and aging. A central focus of my work is examining how social determinants interact with and shape a wide range of health outcomes. During my childhood in rural Pingtung, where I created many cherished memories with nature: playing with mud in the ditches, sneaking into ponds to catch fish when adults weren't around, and often climbing longan trees to enjoy fresh longans while enjoying the scenic views. My childhood house was surrounded by tropical fruits — bananas, mangoes, starfruit, wax apples, longans, lychees, and more. Summers were always a time of concern for me, as typhoons often brought the threat of flooding and the risk of damaging our old brick house. Even the simple indoor entertainment, aka watching TV, could be disrupted due to power outages. Thus, during summer evenings, I would watch the sunset and hope not to see typhoon clouds appearing in the sky. These childhood experiences, along with the increasingly severe climate change in recent years, have gradually made me curious about how extreme climate affects population health. I hope to have a deeper understanding of this issue.

Email: ctchiu@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Website: https://www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/people/Chi-Tsun-Chiu.aspx

Rob Sean Wilson has always dreamed of growing his own plants & flowers since first reading Thoreau’s Walden as a youth in Connecticut USA and later tending a little tomato patch and mulcher in Berkeley. Dwelling eventually in Santa Cruz on one acre by a watershed down to the ocean, he has been able to maintain a garden, a Mary grotto, California grape vines, and an array of over 300 plants and trees cultivated or wild from Angel Trumpet and Cherry trees to opium poppies, hemlock, olive & avocado trees, French and China roses.  His ethos of gardening/farming has been deeply influenced by the Farm for Change worlding project and eco-ponds at Academia Sinica in Taipei, where he hopes one day to help out as a migrant farmer. (more)

Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu

Website: ucsc.academia.edu/RobWilson

Lo is a journalist and freelance art writer. She considers Paris her second home after her long post there as a Central News Agency reporter. She has been co-producing and co-hosting the “Democracy in Trouble” podcast with Chien-Yi Lu since 2019 to promote citizen participation, environmental justice, and class equality. She is committed to persevere as a small but positive force in eliminating discrimination and injustice.

Email: teawithys@gmail.com

When not lecturing over Zoom, working on various research and editing projects in the environmental humanities, or training as a distance runner, Scott Slovic spends much of his time picking weeds in his home garden in Eugene, Oregon, USA, where he and his wife Susie grow blueberries, artichokes, tomatoes, and various other edible and pollinator-friendly plants. Scott served as the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in the early 1990s and was then editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. (more)

Email: sslovic@ori.org

During the second half of the 1990s, I came across “environmental history” on a postgraduate course. It was my first time hearing this term, which caught my attention immediately. I noticed that the demand for interdisciplinary approaches of environmental history suits a person just like me, who “ignores his/her proper occupation” and likes to take various courses at university. Since then, I groped in the dark to find the meanings of all the words I got in the class: “environmental history is not about the history of the environment, but about the interaction between humans and the environment,” reviewing all the subjects of concern from the perspective of environmental history. I am an active member of the Environmental History research group of the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. 

Email: yawenku@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Environmental History Website:

Link

I teach at the Department of Religious Studies, Fu-Jen Catholica University. When I was a student of Psychology, I was inspired by “Psychology of Being-in-the-World” advocated by Professor Yee, Der Huey. In 2010, I came across Ecopsychology through the Chinese edition of Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind translated by The Society of Wilderness in Taiwan. For me, Ecopsychology is an example of “Psychology of Being-in-the-World,” which integrates the wholeness of human mind and the health of the ecological environment. Ecopsychology attempts to restore the original reciprocity between human and nature by searching for an environmentally-based standard of mental health beyond the scope of anthropocentrism. (more)

Email: yijia.tsai@gmail.com
Blog: https://rereadingreligion.org/

I’m a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where I teach courses in American literature and the environmental humanities. My research focuses on literature and multimodal art that explores our capacities for sensing atmospheres, and my recent publications include two books: The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (2020) and Air Conditioning (2024). Currently, there are sweet potato greens, cucumbers, ‘okinawa spinach,’ and Thai chili peppers growing in my backyard garden. 

Email: lhsu@ucdavis.edu

Yang was raised in a farming family in Tainan. He knew of the harsh conditions of the land and what it takes to strive in such environment. After military service, he entered China Steel Corporation and has been working there ever since. CSC’s photo club was where he learned photography and delved into the world of image making. For over 30 years, he has produced dozens of projects, many of which have been exhibited at major institutions and festivals worldwide, including Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Grand Palais, Paris, Kosovo Biennale, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Lishui Photography Festival, and CO4 Taiwan Avant-Garde Documenta. (more)

Email: ysf3397@yahoo.com.tw

Born 1960, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Hung’s creative career spans nearly 40 years, which began with his first camera purchase in 1984. He is a technician at the CPC Corporation, and is therefore coined a “blue collar artist.” His work expresses deep concern over the land and environment, as well as the impact brought upon humans by politics and social change. In the late 1990s, he began to experiment with more personal, expressive forms of photography, often incorporating techniques of collage and performance by himself as the protagonist in his images. (more)

I am a philosopher of science specializing in the relationship between science and values, as well as social and historical epistemology of earth and environmental sciences. My research and teaching interests primarily lie in the intersection of science and policy in social and historical contexts. I seek to better understand, characterize, and analyze the normative aspects of scientific policy advice and scientifically informed policymaking, and have explored case studies ranging from population control to earthquakes to climate change. Moreover, as a philosopher of science, I am interested in reaching out to and engaging with wider audiences, such as researchers in other disciplines and policymakers.

Emai: yu.philosci@gmail.com

Website: https://uranology.wordpress.com/

Originally from Germany and the United Kingdom, Timothy Seekings has been living in Taiwan since 2014 where he has been investigating the worlds of alternative proteins, edible insects, and food systems. He completed his PhD in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies in 2023 and is currently a post-doctoral research fellow with the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan. He co-founded the research project C.Canteen, which continues to serve as a means to explore the farming of crickets, their culinary application, and social processes of edibility formation. (more)  (2024.09-2025.12)

Email: timothyseekings@gmail.com

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of three books of nature writing, Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College.  (more) (2025.04.01-2025.04.22)

Email: jessicajlee@hotmail.com

Website: www.jessicajleewrites.com

I am a mixed Taiwanese/American educator, researcher, and artist raised in Taipei and Oregon. In summer 2024, I was a TIGP intern at the Biodiversity Research Center of Academia Sinica in Dr. Mao-Ning Tuanmu's lab. With the support of my lab and Dr. Shiuhhuah Serena Chou, I studied the diversity and feeding niches of birds at Farm for Change and other roofs on campus, in a project titled "My upstairs neighbor is a bird?!: The impact of farm and green roofs on avian diversity". I first experienced the way gardens build relationships and care between species while working at an educational farm on Sauvie Island, growing vegetables and leading youth field trips. (more) (2024.07-2024.12)

Email: dritattersfield@gmail.com

Website: hellodri.itch.io

At the beginning of this summer, I was invited to visit the Farm for Change: Climate, Eco-poetics, Earth Justice (FFC) unit of the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, and was amazed by how wonderful the farming was. It was a wet afternoon; the rain flooded the farm. Raindrops fell from the plants; the air was fresh on the roof. The scene of solemnity and tranquility of life as such presented itself; it filled me with wonder. My research interest is contemporary Continental Philosophy, especially French post-structualism. In recent years my research has focused on vitalism in French philosophy. It would be a great chance, I am convinced, to explore nature and life by actually growing plants with physical labor. In so doing, the complicated relationship between abstract ideas and body may be more explicated in many ways. (2024.07-2024.09)

Email: 130990@o365.tku.edu.tw