Klinger Featured in Sarah Lawrence Magazine as Global Citizen
Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently featured in the magazine of her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College. Klinger is featured as a “Global Citizen: Recognizing the Rights and Responsibilities Shared Across Race, Class, and Cultures.”
Klinger discusses her recent book, Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press, 2018), as well as the way in which she is paying forward her formative experiences as an undergraduate field research assistant by taking Boston University students with her to field sites in the Amazon.
From the text of the article:
Modern life would grind to an abrupt halt without so-called rare earth materials—a group of 17 chemically similar elements, with names straight out of a science fiction novel, found in everything from smartphones to solar panels.
For example, neodymium is used to make powerful magnets found in loudspeakers and computer hard drives, while praseodymium creates an ultrastrong alloy for aircraft engines. And a soft, silvery metal known as yttrium has diverse applications in lasers, white LED lights, camera lenses, and superconductors.
The unique magnetic and conductive properties shared by this family of metals have rendered them indispensable in today’s technology-obsessed world. But as witnessed firsthand by Julie Michelle Klinger ’06, the global demand for rare earth elements has left behind a trail of devastation within local mining districts. Klinger’s in-depth fieldwork led her to the communities of Inner Mongolia in China—the country that dominates the global production of rare earths—where the environment and its inhabitants feel the blowback of the hazardous mining process.
“I can tell who was born and raised downstream of the mine because they often have skin lesions, thinner hair, brown teeth, and bone deformities,” says Klinger, an assistant professor of international relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. “It’s both heartbreaking and infuriating, because their suffering was entirely avoidable.”
Julie Michelle Klinger, PhD, specializes in development, environment, and security politics in Latin America and China in comparative and global perspective. Her recent book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press in Fall 2017) received the 2017 Meridian Award from the American Association of Geographers for its “unusually important contribution to advancing the art and science of geography.”