Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Lizzie Yarina “Maps that Leak: Living with Climate Adaptation in Vietnam's Mekong Delta”

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms aremeaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

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Lizzie Yarina is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture with affiliate appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Global Asian Studies at Northeastern University. She works in the area of sustainability and resilience.

Yarina is a designer and planner whose work explores the relationship between environmental risk and spatial politics. Her research reveals how large-scale resilience projects are underpinned by the technocratic norms of the climate change planning industry. These norms, in turn, shape the ways our world is being reshaped in light of environmental crises.

Her current book project investigates the design politics of climate change adaptation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta through the lens of representation. She is co-editor of the forthcoming interdisciplinary volume “Building Models, Changing Climates” (Columbia University Press). Her research on the relationships among design thinking, territorial politics, and climate risk has been published in both public scholarship and peer-reviewed venues including Places Journal, Log, Arch+, Architecture & Culture, and Global Environmental Change. Her teaching brings this scholarship into architecture and urban design, working within and beyond academia to ask how we should design in a hotter, wetter, and riskier world.