Research + Publications
See my Curriculum Vitae for a full list of publications.
Critical minerals, China, and decarbonization
Stream 1: Global China, development, the Belt and Road initiative, infrastructure
This research stream develops a critical, grounded examination of Global China by interrogating how Chinese-led development, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and infrastructure projects are imagined, enacted, and lived across Asia, with particular emphasis on Southeast Asia and Laos. Across conceptual interventions and sustained empirical work, the research moves beyond state-centric or macro-geopolitical readings of the BRI to foreground corridors, zones, and railways as socio-spatial processes that reorder land, labor, mobility, temporality, and visibility. Methodologically, this research combines multi-sited ethnography, mobile and experiential methods, and long-term engagement with specific sites to show how infrastructure simultaneously consolidates state power, generates uneven development, and produces friction, suspension, and anticipation. It advances several analytical contributions, such as a genealogy of Global China as a contested geographical imaginary; processes of “corridorization”; and a politics of sight that attends to spectacle, in/visibility, and everyday life in the shadow of infrastructure. Collectively, these publications contribute to scholarship that underscores the ways in which the BRI is not a coherent model or monolithic strategy, but a heterogeneous, negotiated, contested, and often contradictory set of infrastructural world-making practices that must be understood through their grounded social, political, and spatial effects.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
DiCarlo, Jessica and Meredith DeBoom. 2025. Unsettling Global China. Dialogues in Human Geography.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Meredith DeBoom. 2025. Six paths of Global China: A genealogy of a contested geographical imaginary. Dialogues in Human Geography.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Juliet Lu. 2025. Chinese Investment in Laos. Lao Land for Life project, Vientiane.
DiCarlo, Jessica and David Fernando Bachrach. 2025. The corridor as commodity: Enclosure, legibility, and uneven development in Southeast Asian railway projects. Antipode.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2025. Behind the Spectacle of the Belt and Road Initiative: Corridor Perspectives, In/visibility, and a Politics of Sight. In Seeing China’s Belt and Road, edited by Rachel Silvey and Edward Schatz. Oxford University Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2026. Cycling as method, train as transect: Exploring infrastructural friction and flow through mobile ethnography. In Being Present: Emerging Ethnographic Perspectives and the Study of Laos, edited by Rosalie Stolz and Paul-David Lutz. The University of Chicago Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2024. Speed, Suspension, and Stasis: Life in the Shadow of Infrastructure. In Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds, edited by Jean-Paul Addie, Michael Glass, and Jen Nelles. Bristol University Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2024. Bringing a Politics of Sight to the Belt and Road Initiative: In/visibility, Infrastructure, Global China. Transformations: Belt and Road in Global Perspective. Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2023. Forum: A Decade of the Belt and Road Initiative. Global China Pulse, 2(1): 117-146
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2023. The BRI, Grounded. Global China Pulse, 2(1): 143-146.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2022. Eventuality and Rhythms of Life in a City Yet-to-Come. Global China Pulse, 1(1): 145-159.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2022. Boten: from Dawn till Dusk. Global China Pulse, 1(1): 141-144.
Oakes, Tim, Jessica Clendenning, Jessica DiCarlo, Matthew S. Erie, Max Hirsh, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Hasan H. Karrar, Verena La Mela, Juliet Lu, Till Mostowlansky, Galen Murton, Huiying Ng, Roger Norum, Nadine Plachta, Björn Reichhardt, Alessandro Rippa, Jasnea Sarma, Emilia Sulek, Dorothy Tang, Zarina Urmanbetova and Thomas White. 2022. China’s global development model: Looking beyond the Belt and Road Initiative. Fribourg, Munich, and Boulder.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2022. Boten: from Dawn till Dusk. Global China Pulse, 1(1): 141-144.
Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka, Alessandro Rippa, Jessica Clendenning, Jessica DiCarlo, Matthew S. Erie, Max Hirsh, Hasan H. Karrar, Verena La Mela, Juliet Lu, Till Mostowlansky, Galen Murton, Huiying Ng, Roger Norum, Tim Oakes, Nadine Plachta, Björn Reichhardt, Jasnea Sarma, Emilia Sulek, Dorothy Tang, Zarina Urmanbetova and Thomas White. 2022. Demystifying the Belt and Road Initiative. Fribourg, Munich and Boulder.
Suhardiman, Diana, Jessica DiCarlo, Oulavanh Keovilignavong, Jonathan Rigg, and Alan Nicol. 2021. (Re)constructing state power through the Laos-China Railway project. Geoforum, 124(2): 79-88.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2020. Development as Palimpsest: Infrastructures Revived in Boten’s Architecture. Roadsides, 004: 15-23.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Timothy Oakes. 2022. From China Model to Global China (ChinaMade Brief #14). ChinaMade: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Courtney Wittekind. 2022. Infrastructures of Urban Life Yet-to-Come (ChinaMade Brief #12). ChinaMade: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2022. Boten Special Economic Zone on The People’s Map of Global China.
Global China, development & infrastructure
Development, environment & political ecology in Asia
Geopolitical economy of US-China competition
Stream 2: Critical minerals, China, and the geopolitical economy of decarbonization
This research stream examines the political economy, political ecology, and geopolitics of critical minerals, with particular attention to China’s role in reshaping extractive governance, supply chains, and environmental authority amid intensifying geopolitics. Across comparative and multi-scalar studies of rare earths, cobalt, and other strategic minerals, the work shows how decarbonization is not simply a technical or environmental project, but a contested process structured by fractured state authority, corporate power, financialization, and uneven global development. It also shows how “green” standards and ESG instruments — advanced by both Chinese and Western actors — operate as technologies that reconfigure responsibility and risk without resolving extractive harms. Through case studies spanning China, the US, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and transnational mineral supply chains, this body of work advances concepts such as fractured extraction, just-shoring, and minerals at the margins to show how the green transition reproduces colonial and capitalist inequalities even as it claims environmental leadership. Collectively, it contributes a relational, anti-exceptionalist account of China’s environmental power while offering broader insights into the governance, geopolitics, and justice implications of decarbonization efforts.
Part of the Critical Mineral Research Hub.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
Deberdt, Raphael and Jessica DiCarlo. Minerals at the margins and the new geopolitics of critical minerals. Energy Research and Social Science.
DiCarlo, Jessica, Raphael Deberdt, Nicole Smith, Scott Odell, Aaron Malone, and Lydia Jennings. 2026. A just energy transition requires just-shoring critical materials. Nature Energy.
Harlan, Tyler, Yixian Sun, Juliet Lu, Jessica DiCarlo, Coraline Goron, Yifei Li, Jessica Liao, KuoRay Mao, Jesse Rodenbiker, Deborah Seligsohn, Alex Wang, Niklas Weins, and Annah Lake Zhu. 2025. China aspires to be an environmental leader: How should the rest of the world engage? Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.
DiCarlo, Jessica, Cory Combs and Raphael Deberdt. 2025. Fractured extraction: mining firms, provinces and municipalities in the decentralized politics of China’s rare earth production. The China Quarterly, 1–22.
Debert, Raphael and Jessica DiCarlo. 2024. Pericentricity on the Congolese Copperbelt: How the DRC Shapes Chinese Cobalt Supply Chains and the Low-Carbon Transition. Globalizations.
Debert, Raphael and Jessica DiCarlo, Hyeyoon Park. 2024. Standardizing “green” extractivism: Chinese & Western environmental, social, and governance instruments in the critical mineral sector. Extractive Industries and Society, 19: 101516.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2024. Can the Race for Decarbonization Be ‘Green’?: Critical Minerals, China’s Responsible Mining Initiatives, and the Role of Non-State Actors. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Deberdt, Raphael and Jessica DiCarlo. 2024. DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt – how control by local elites can shape the global battery industry. The Conversation.
Stream 3: Development, environment, and
political ecology in Asia
This research stream brings a political ecology lens to development & environment-society relations in Asia, focusing on infrastructure development, land politics, resources, and post-disaster interventions Grounded in Southeast Asia and the Himalaya, the work centers questions of territoriality, frontiers, agrarian change, and infrastructural violence. It analyzes, for instance, how infrastructure, special economic zones, and cross-border projects reshape landscapes, producing new forms of dispossession, uneven development, and everyday negotiations over resources and sovereignty. This research builds on more than a decade of fieldwork in Laos, China, Nepal, and the greater Mekong region. Through ethnographic and policy-engaged research, it interrogates the translation, implementation, and limits of social and environmental safeguards, revealing gaps between formal standards and lived outcomes. This research also makes methodological and conceptual contributions, advancing kinesthetic methodologies to understanding society–environment relations and transformations.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
DiCarlo, Jessica and Hilary Faxon. Forthcoming. New Political Ecologies of Southeast Asia. (Special Issue)
Bennett, Mia, Jessica DiCarlo, and Sarah Elwood. 2025. The world from a bicycle: Cycling as kinesthetic methodology. Progress in Human Geography.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Kearrin Sims. 2023. Corridors of connectivity and the infrastructural land rush in Laos. The Routledge Handbook for Global Land and Resource Grabbing
DiCarlo, Jessica, Sam Williams, Aaditee Kudrimoti, Pakhi Das, Melissa Butynski, Amrita Neelakantan. 2022. FOCUS-BRI: Framing Opportunities for Conservation by Understanding Safeguards in the Belt and Road Initiative. Report for the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and the Hewlett Foundation.
DiCarlo, Jessica et al. (other authors anonymous). 2022. Understanding Social and Environmental Impacts and Safeguards surrounding BRI projects in Laos for Navigating the Belt and Road Initiative Phase II. Asia Society Policy Institute, New York.
Chen, Wanjing (Kelly) and DiCarlo, Jessica. 2021. Laos-China Railway on The People’s Map of Global China.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2021. Lost in Translation: Environmental and Social Safeguards for the Laos-China Railway. Global Development Policy Center Blog, Boston University.
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2020. Mind the Gap: Grounding Development Finance and Safeguards through Land Compensation on the Laos-China Belt and Road Corridor. Global China Initiative Working Paper 013. Boston University, Global Development Policy Center.
Song Zhouying and Jessica DiCarlo. 2021. Socio-environmental implications of the Laos-China Railway. Case Study for the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research. In Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative: Case Study Perspectives, edited by Liu Weidong. Beijing: The Commercial Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica, Katie Epstein, Robin Marsh & Inger Måren. 2018. Post-disaster agricultural transitions in Nepal. Ambio, 1–12.
Epstein, Katie, Jessica DiCarlo, Robin Marsh, Bikash Adhikari, Dinesh Paudel, Isha Ray & Inger Måren. 2018. Recovery and adaptation after the 2015 Nepal earthquakes: A smallholder household perspective. Ecology and Society, 23(1): 29.
Epstein, Katie, Jessica DiCarlo, Robin Marsh, Isha Ray & Inger Måren. 2017. Coping Strategies of Smallholder Farming Communities after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake: Insights into Post-Disaster Resilience and Social–Ecological Change. Case Studies in the Environment.
DiCarlo, Jessica, Sri Gopakumar, Suneeta Krishnan & Preet K. Dhillan. 2016. Adoption of information and communication technologies for early detection of breast and cervical cancers in low- and middle-income countries. The Journal of Global Oncology and the Annals of Global Health, 82(3): 453-454.
Stream 4: Critical geopolitics & political economy of US-China competition
This research stream builds on a recognition that contemporary power struggles and geopolitics cut across the preceding research streams. As my Global China research has increasingly accounted for US-China competition, I co-founded the Second Cold War Observatory (SCWO) with Seth Schindler (University of Manchester). The SCWO has quickly grown into a widely recognized global research network spanning six continents. This research stream advances critical geopolitical and political economy analyses of US-China competition by reframing it not as a bipolar return to Cold War logics, but as a historically distinct struggle over infrastructure, networks, and state–capital relations within an unevenly globalized capitalist system. This work develops and mobilizes concepts such as the infrastructure state, state-capitalist geopolitics, and polyalignment to explain how rivalry is organized through control over infrastructure, digital, production, and financial networks, and how it is mediated by regional conflicts, transnational connections, and local agency. My research also shows how states navigate, exploit, and are constrained by competing development and investment initiatives. Taken together, this work traces how power is exercised through networks of global connectivity and how infrastructural rivalry restructures sovereignty, development trajectories, and geopolitical strategy beyond the traditional views of great-power politics.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
DiCarlo Jessica, Shahar Hameiri, Seth Schindler, Lee Jones. 2026. The Second Cold War and the Politics of Polyalignment. Third World Quarterly. (Special Issue)
Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo, editors. 2022. The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Dinesh Paudel. 2025. Infrastructural polyalignment and Himalayan geopolitics: subjugation, small-state agency, and regional competition in Nepal. Third World Quarterly.
Alami, Ilias, Jessica DiCarlo, Steve Rolf, Seth Schindler. 2025. The new frontline: The US-China battle for control of global networks. State of Power 2025: The Geopolitics of Capitalism. The Transnational Institute.
Schindler, Seth, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo, Nicholas Jepson, Steve Rolf, Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ, Louis Cyuzuzo, Meredith DeBoom, Alireza F. Farahani, Imogen T. Liu, Hannah McNicola, Julie T. Miao, Philip Nock, Gilead Teri, Maximiliano Facundo Vila Seoane, Kevin Ward, Tim Zajontz, and Yawei Zhao. 2023. The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks. Geopolitics, 29(4): 1083-1120.
Schindler, Seth & Jessica DiCarlo. 2022. Towards a critical geopolitics of China-US rivalry: Pericentricity, regional conflicts, and transnational connections. Area, 54(4): 638-645.
Schindler, Seth, Jessica DiCarlo and Dinesh Paudel. 2021. The new Cold War and the rise of the 21st-century infrastructure state. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(2): 331-346.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Micah Ingalls. 2022. Multipolar infrastructures: Mosaic geopolitics and state restructuring in Laos. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press.
Schindler, Seth and Jessica DiCarlo. 2022. Twenty-first-century Third Worldism? In The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Seth Schindler. 2022. Geopolitics, infrastructure, and the emergent geographies of US-China competition. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Seth Schindler. 2025. What did you do during the Trump Times? Global Policy Journal.
DiCarlo, Jessica, Ilias Alami, Steve Rolf, and Seth Schindler. 2025. Sinews of control: How state-capitalist geopolitics is reshaping global networks and power. The Monitor, by The Carter Center.
DiCarlo, Jessica and Seth Schindler. 2020. Will Biden pass the America LEADS Act and start a new Cold War with China? Global Policy Journal.
Other projects
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Politics of Development, Extraction, and Environmental Protection in the Oquirrh Mountains
Cait Quirk, Mara Scallon, Maddie Hill, & Jessica DiCarlo
The Oquirrh Mountains in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah extend 30 miles from north to south and 15 miles wide, dividing Toole and Salt Lake Valleys, and running up to the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake from the northern edge of Utah Lake. Less than an hour away from Utah’s capital, the Oquirrhs are constantly in sight of much of Salt Lake City, yet infrequently visited or studied compared to the Wasatch Mountain range.
We approached this research project with the aim of understanding the social, cultural, political, historical, and other forces that shape perceptions and uses of the Oquirrhs. What has made the Oquirrhs overlooked? What property regimes make parts of the Oquirrhs (in)accessible to the public and why, and what patterns of access and land control led to the current situation? What are the histories of the range, including and beyond mining? How have the uses of the mountains affected environmental health? Why have conservation efforts focused on the Wasatch Mountains and not the Oquirrhs?
Articles are in progress, and our storymap can be found here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a8b1c142de3442428b7d42d00d550327
Housing Insecurity in Utah
Kateryna Malaia, Jessica DiCarlo, and Sagan Gotberg
Housing Insecurity in Utah is a multidisciplinary pilot research project that explores the lived experiences of housing instability in the Salt Lake Valley. Amid Utah’s rapid growth and rising housing costs, many residents, especially vulnerable populations, face unsafe, unstable, and unaffordable living conditions. This project goes beyond affordability to investigate how housing insecurity intersects with environmental hazards, systemic policy failures, and social injustice. Through oral histories, interviews, and visual documentation of residential spaces, the project highlights how people cope with precarious housing—often in spaces that are overlooked by conventional housing research. In particular, we pay attention to “in-between” situations where people are not homeless but lack secure, stable, or safe homes. Key groups include refugees and immigrants, formerly incarcerated individuals, linguistically isolated communities, university students, and those in short-term housing. Combining approaches from human geography, architecture, planning, and environmental studies, the project reveals how housing insecurity disrupts daily life, deepens inequality, and exposes people to environmental risks. Ultimately, it seeks to link personal experiences with broader systems, offering a justice-oriented view of the housing crisis in Utah.
Outputs:
Malaia, Kate, Silvina Lopez Barre, and Jessica DiCarlo. 2024. What Can Architects Really Do? Housing Crisis and Quality in the United States. Architectural Research Centers Consortium: ARCC Conference Proceedings.
Several oral histories and housing resources from the project can be found here: https://housing-insecurity.vercel.app/