Goldstein receives ACLS support for work on recycling

Associate Professor of History Joshua Goldstein has won an American Council of Learned Societies grant to support his on-going work on recycling in Chinese history. His project is titled Municipal and Regional Level Analysis of Beijing's Post-Consumer Recycling Sector.  Goldstein is spending spring 2008 carrying out research in China. Here is his project abstract:

"This project involves extensive field research into the informal recycling system centered in Beijing, assessing its local and regional effects, particularly in areas of Hebei and Hunan provinces. Beijing’s recycling sector is based on the labor of an estimated 300,000 rural migrant scavengers and collects an estimated 1.5 million tons of post-consumer waste (paper, plastics, metals) annually, but it has gone relatively ignored by scholars and faces neglect, if not outright discrimination, by the Beijing municipal government. Through extensive interviews with government administrators and migrant recyclers, as well as through the implementation of surveys and an extensive array of site visits, this study constructs the first comprehensive picture of this sector at a municipal and regional level; when work is complete, the collected data will be analyzed from a number of perspectives, and a book-length study on the topic will be produced."

This Committee on Scholarly Communications with China (CSCC) Program awards grants to US scholars for research in China for periods of 4-12 months. Funding for the program was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The CSCC, jointly sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Social Science Research Council, was established in 1966 to promote contacts between individual American scholars and private scholarly groups and their counterparts in China.

Goldstein previously received support from the USC U.S.-China Institute. A report on his 2007 fieldwork is available at: china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx.