Biography

Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SUTD.  Trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, Fearnley received a Joint Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. His book, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter, is published on Duke University Press.  Currently, he is conducting two research projects: 1) on the contested futures of rice breeding and genetics in China, in which he analyzes the intersections of Chinese rice genome research, food safety movements, and the human-environment configurations of wet-rice paddy agriculture; 2) on waste, circular economy, and the ecology of health in contemporary Singapore.

Recent

• Sci-Tech Asia Research Network, Technoviews 11: Podcast on my book Virulent Zones. Listen on Spotify or Youtube
• Somatosphere Book Forum: Therapeutic Politics of Care in Asia
• “Phylogenetic Trees and Viral Origins,” Visualizing the Virus

Selected Publications

Books

• Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press, 2020)
• Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Edited with Anthony Stavrianakis and Gaymon Bennett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

Journal Articles

• “Fake Eggs: from counter-qualification to popular certification in China’s food safety crisis.” BioSocieties 2021
• “Viral Sovereignty or Sequence Etiquette? Asian Science, Open Data, and Knowledge Control in Global Virus Surveillance.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 2020.
• “After the Livestock Revolution: Free-grazing ducks and influenza uncertainties in South China.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 2018.
• “Wild Goose Chase: The Displacement of Influenza Research in the Fields of Poyang Lake, China.” Cultural Anthropology 30(1), February 2015.
• “Epidemic Intelligence: Langmuir and the Birth of Disease Surveillance.”
  Behemoth 3, January 2010: 37-56.
• “Signals Come and Go: Syndromic Surveillance and Styles of Biosecurity.”
  Environment and Planning A 40(7), 2008: 1615-1632.

Selected Media and Talks

• Interviewed on Channel News Asia, For Food’s Sake, S3, Ep. 4: Diet. (On Covid-19)
• Interviewed on Channel News Asia, Money Mind, Ep. 26: Climate Change Special (On Honk! app and informal recycling)
• University of Cambridge, The Center for Global Knowledge Studies, “Covid-19 as a zoonotic disease.” 23 July 2020.
• Columbia University, Weatherhead East Asia Institute, “Tracking and treating coronavirus in China and beyond.” 23 July 2020.