Speaker: Tong Lam, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto

From Chairman Mao’s “receiving” of an ore in Zhongnanhai to the nationwide mapping of mineral resources and the mass movement for sighting and reporting minerals, the 1950s marked the beginning of what could be described as China’s age of extractivism. The intensifying interactions between humans and nonhumans in socialist China had profound global and planetary consequences that continue to resonate today.

Tong Lam’s research areas include the modern and contemporary history of China, science and technology, politics and aesthetics, urbanism, and empire. His first book, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (2011), analyzes the profound consequences of the emergence of the technology of the “social fact” and social survey research in modern China. Professor Lam’s current research examines China’s urban infrastructures, ruins and ruination, as well as the renewed imperial ambitions of the later Qing empire. As a visual artist, he uses photographic and cinematographic techniques to dissect contemporary China’s transformation, as well as Cold War ruins around the world. He has published a photo-essay book, Abandoned Futures (2013), and has exhibited his work internationally.