Jasmine Zhang

My research explores how understandings of nature and human–nature relationships are produced, experienced and negotiated through discourse and practice. Working across critical tourism studies, political ecology and environmental communication, I am particularly interested in how seemingly established ideas about nature, place and identity are constructed, reproduced and challenged.

My research journey began with nature interpretation. In 2008, still a bachelor student, I became involved in developing a nature interpretation system in Pudacuo National Park in Shangri-La, southwest China. This experience prompted me to question what kinds of relationships between people and nature were being communicated, whose understandings of nature were represented, and what alternative relationships might be overlooked. These questions subsequently shaped my doctoral research and my engagement with critical tourism studies and political ecology.

Poststructuralist and relational thinking have been important throughout my research. Grounded in anti-essentialist approach I hold an interest in questioning fixed understandings of nature, culture and identity, and in exploring how relationships and meanings emerge through particular historical, social and material circumstances. This orientation has informed my research across different geographical and empirical contexts, including tourism development, Indigenous tourism, wildlife conservation and environmental change in the Arctic.

My current research at the Swedish Centre for Nature Interpretation brings these interests back to nature interpretation, now approached as a historically situated and performative practice. Rather than focusing exclusively on what interpretation achieves, I am interested in how it participates in shaping particular understandings of nature and desirable human–nature relationships. I am also increasingly interested in collaborative and experimental forms of research that create opportunities for practitioners and researchers to question established assumptions and explore alternative possibilities.