Presentation short abstract

This contribution investigates the disciplinary potential of environmental sociology, showing how researchers mobilise Fei Xiaotong’s legacy to legitimize the discipline and reconfigure perspectives on local-socio environmental inquiry.

Presentation long abstract

China’s rapidly evolving environmental landscape, shaped by global ambitions and domestic ecological pressures, demands analytical approaches capable of integrating politics, ecological values, and questions of environmental justice. Environmental Sociology is a particularly promising field to address such complexities as it examines how environmental ideologies, governance practices, and social actors interact and how different stakeholders negotiate the state’s environmental visions.

Acknowledging that state-promoted discourse remains a crucial terrain that scholars must navigate analytically, the presentation traces the intellectual and institutional conditions that enabled the emergence of environmental sociology in China, showing how works produced within its domain, while engaging with the official narrative, manage to find space to address locally situated ecological issues. Within this field, the legacy of Professor Fei Xiaotong has played a fundamental role, providing contemporary scholars with a culturally resonant standard for examining human–environment relations. Fei’s research on development and environmental protection, frontier governance, pastoral resource management and local ecological knowledge make his empirically rooted insights particularly valuable and strategically relevant today. Fei’s work, in this sense, becomes a resource through which environmental sociologists can navigate ideological pressures, strengthen disciplinary identity, and address emergent environmental challenges through locally informed and culture-sensitive inqury.

By analysing selected recent cases in which environmental sociologists mobilize Fei’s inheritance, the presentation demonstrates how scholars legitimize their research and generate innovative readings of socio-nature relations, governance dynamics, and ecological justice. It further illustrates how, in certain instances, the prioritization of environmental protection has opened spaces for critical reflection.