Agricultural Modernization in China: Interview with Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek interviewing Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, two scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on the modernization of China.

Ross Doll is Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on long-term ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing on food security, landscape, and rural politics. Dr. Doll teaches courses on the geographies of natural resources, global and Asian development, and global poverty. He holds a PhD in Geography and a MA in China Studies from the University of Washington.

Coleman R. Mahler is a PhD Candidate in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation is a history of information and truth in postwar China and Taiwan, exploring how governments across the Taiwan Strait gathered and analyzed agricultural data, and how these mass data gathering projects produced new understandings and practices of truth-making. He has published in journals including The PRC History Review and the Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming).

A transscript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/agricultural-modernization.