Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation

Adela Zhang

Main content start

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2019 - 2020, 2017 - 2018 Academic Years

Provincialized Poverty: Encountering the 'State' through Resource-Based Development in Peru

Various government agencies have posited large-scale resource extraction as key to poverty alleviation in Peru’s provinces, particularly the Andes and the Amazons. Zhang’s project proposes an ethnographic study of how development initiatives negotiated through Peru's institutional dialogue process are formulated by government officials and experienced by the rural poor living in resource-rich regions. By taking a two-sided approach that focuses on observing the work of bureaucrats responsible for citizen welfare and national development and conducting interviews in communities deemed "in need” of development, this research examines the lived effects of extraction-based development in Peru.


Adela Zhang, Department of Anthropology

Adela Zhang

Adela Zhang is a PhD student in anthropology at Stanford University. Zhang’s research examines how social conflicts over extraction illustrate long-standing tensions between the priorities of large-scale development and democracy promotion in Latin America. Additional interests include state governance, extractive capitalism, and popular politics in the Andean region. At Stanford, Zhang has served as the co-coordinator of the Latin America and Caribbean Working Group and the Histories of Capitalism Reading Group. Zhang received a BA in economics and Latin American Studies, with honors, from the University of Chicago in 2017.

Return to past recipients of graduate student research funding