Andrea Pia is a legal and environmental anthropologist working at the interface between political economy, development, and the critical study of the commons. 

Andrea’s regional focus over the last 15 years has been the People’s Republic of China. So far, his work has revolved around one set of interrelated questions: How do society and the natural environment affect and constitute one another? Along what lines are the benefits and burdens of human projects for the environment distributed? What are the felicity conditions for counterprojects to emerge? 

Andrea’s first ethnographic research, which produced publications in Italian and material for a digital ethnography, was conducted in a cluster of Ming dynasty villages in the outskirt of Beijing. This research investigated man-made water shortages and the resulting patterns of environmentally induced migration among different age groups of rural residents. Its contribution was to connect migratory decisions to changing attitudes towards place, family and work and altered perceptions of environmental risk and workplace hazards. Outputs of this first piece of research explore the material and symbolic process of progressive destitution of China’s historic rural communities and its connection to the country’s current environmental predicaments. 

Andrea’s second ethnographic project and book manuscript Cutting the Mass Line: Moving Water and the Political in Southwest China, aims at rethinking social scientific approaches to collective action by exploring China’s ongoing water crisis from the vantage point of Huize County, a water-stressed, ecologically damaged, multi-ethnic area of rural Yunnan Province. This research follows Chinese hydro-engineers, street-level bureaucrats and embattled rural residents as they attend to and negotiate with the various raptures of the everyday that their enrolment in the global quest for water sustainability is materializing in rural China. Publications from this project spans from exploring the pragmatism and conflictual ethics of street-level water bureaucrats, to elucidating counter-theories of property relations and the commons in rural China. Dispute mediation and grassroots collective actions have been the subject of a number of other publications, with a focus on the jurisprudence of conflict management in authoritarian contexts.   

In 2017, Andrea began a new ethnographic project provisionally entitled Justice After Carbon. This project explores the emerging antagonism between indigenous environmental politics and the infrastructural élan of the Chinese state water industry as it moves to redesign the increasingly endangered flow of the Mekong River. This project aims at revitalising the anthropology of expertise in the age of environmental breakdown by looking at the conceptual nexus between justice, class and ethnicity, and the disjunctive environmental politics their interpolation generates. Andrea is organising an international symposium around these themes in collaboration with LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. 

Andrea is deeply interested in public anthropology and in the advocacy of open access scholarship. He is one of the founders and co-editors of Made in China Journal, an open-access journal and online platform hosted by the Australian National University (ANU) and supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant. In 2016-2018 Andrea developed, with the support of an LSE IGNITE! Grant, The Long Day of Young Peng, a bespoke point-and-click interactive digital ethnography that follows the day of a young Chinese migrant from his native village to Beijing. In 2019, Andrea organised an international workshop on Open Access, Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom and designed a new teaching module on Public Anthropology. He is also an assiduous contributor to the anthropology website ALLEGRA Lab. 

Since 2013, Andrea has taught courses in Legal Anthropology, Anthropology and Human Rights, Culture and Globalisation, China in Comparative Perspective, Anthropology, Film and Text and Public Anthropology.