专家简介：

Dr. Qinhong Xu is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a Visiting Young Scholar at MEL, Xiamen University (September 2025-August 2026). She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Water Resources Management from Wageningen University in 2024. Her primary research field is political ecology, with a specific focus on power relations in environmental governance. Engaging with concepts such as “imaginary,” “technology,” “infrastructure,” “territorialization,” and “governmentality,” her work examines how environmental governance practices and power dynamics mutually shape each other. Her current research centers on the digitalization of nature. This line of inquiry further explores the productive intersections arising from the collaboration of environmental science and social science in the digital era.

Dr. Xu has received competitive grants, including the Wageningen University Junior Researcher Grant and Starter-Innovative Grant. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Manchester in 2023.

Over the past five years, she has published several articles in leading journals, such as Environmental Politics, Political Geography, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and The International Journal of Commons.

报告摘要：

Digital twin technologies play an increasingly important role in addressing predictive management and real-time decision-making for environmental challenges, with the potential to significantly transform river governance. This project takes “Digital Twin Yangtze” as a case study to investigate how rivers are rendered “smart” through the integration of digital technologies, while critically examining the politics of digital twins from a political ecology perspective. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Riverhood, which conceptualizes the river as eco-society, as territory, as subject, and as movement, the research unravels the ongoing technical, political, and cultural-symbolic transformation of river territories, imaginaries, and practices through governmentalization and techno-digital river subject-making. Through this inquiry, the project critically scrutinizes the politics of river digitalization. It advocates for moving beyond the pursuit of computational sophistication toward a more nuanced, interdisciplinary, inclusive, and re-politicized perspective in environmental governance.