Mingxin Li

This practice-based PhD investigates the socio-environmental transformations in the Zoige Plateau, the east Tibetan region, focusing on how the Chinese government has employed various modes of representation to drive political, environmental, and social transformations. These representations, rooted in a reductive view of living and non-living beings, imply the abstraction and simplification of both the land and its inhabitants, transforming Zoige into a resource for national economic development. Such interventions have marginalised Tibetan knowledge systems and disrupted the interconnected relations between Tibetans and non-human entities.

This research develops ‘performative representation’ as the methodology for resisting the state’s Tibetan epistemology erasure. By performative representation I mean the practice of embedding myself within the lived experiences of local Tibetans—through shared practices such as living, eating, working, and engaging in daily life. Furthermore, performative representation seeks to co-produce representations in collaboration with the community through ‘thinking-feeling’ together with local people rather than ‘speaking for’ them, developing new forms of Tibetan knowledge against the state’s knowledge colonisation. This methodology enables a deeper engagement with the complex relations that constitute Tibetan life and land, positioning research as a collective, participatory process.

Performative representation focuses on land care practice, which centres on the loss of grasslands essential to current Tibetan herders’ livelihoods. The land care practice will be unpacked with socio-ecological practices, including grass seeds collecting and planting, collective and intergenerational conversations, story-telling and spatial practice around pastures, sacred landscapes, herbs, weather observation, and the care of non-human living beings (e.g., yaks and sheep). This practice not only works toward ecological restoration (e.g., grass planting and water collection) but also fosters knowledge transmission between Tibetan elders and younger generations through oral and visual communications, consolidating their own positionality towards their land and knowledge. In this way, the research will mobilise local Tibetans to relearn their territory and situated knowledge mentally and physically, which could form resistance to the manipulation and knowledge erasure imposed by the state’s transformations legitimated by scientific realist representations.