Hello! This is 李昊霖 (Lee How-Lin), and you can call me Ellen :)

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I am a researcher at the University of Bern’s Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), based in Vientiane, Laos. My work engages with political ecology, resource governance, and Chinese overseas investment, with a particular interest in mining and critical minerals. I grew up in China, studied in Canada and France, and now work in Laos. Moving between places and languages has made me think of myself as a kind of translator, not only between languages, but between different ways of knowing and making sense of the world. I am drawn to the people and institutions that play similar roles in global resource supply chains, carrying knowledge across institutional and geographic boundaries and making distant places intelligible to others.

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During my Master of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Teresa Kramarz, I studied water governance across the global lithium battery supply chain through Chinese lithium mining in northern Argentina. I began with sustainability standards, but what stayed with me was how differently the same environmental problems were understood across standards, corporate reporting, local politics, and extraction sites. This made me increasingly attentive to the gap between governance on paper and in practice. Policies and standards do not simply travel: they are interpreted and reshaped by the actors who carry them, influencing which forms of knowledge come to matter.

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Working in Laos has brought these questions much closer to the ground. My current research on Special Economic Zones, Chinese investment, and mining regularly moves between formal policy and everyday implementation. Mining has become an especially important space for me to explore these dynamics. My earlier work followed Chinese actors involved in overseas mining standards and critical-mineral supply chains, while more recent research in Laos and along the China-Myanmar border has made me curious about what happens when those broader systems meet particular places. I am especially interested in the less visible actors and processes through which knowledge about resource frontiers is produced, communicated, and brought into decision-making.

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This perspective grew out of my research path. At UBC, under the guidance of Dr. Juliet Lu and with the support of the Global Political Ecology Group, I was introduced to political ecology through research on Chinese rubber investment in Laos. That experience taught me to look beyond commodities to the landscapes and social relations behind their production. Later work with Dr. Jessica DiCarlo on Chinese critical mineral governance led me to think more closely about how governance travels across borders, while earlier geopolitical analysis at the Intellisia Institute had introduced me to many of these issues from the more distant perspective of international politics. Moving between these scales has shaped the questions I now ask about resource frontiers, knowledge, and translation.

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This website is where I document that journey through field notes, travel essays, and observations from Laos and elsewhere, in both English and Chinese. Many of the questions that interest me begin with small encounters—a landscape seen from the road, an unexpected conversation, a market, or a border crossing—and slowly open onto much larger systems. I travel, write, explore music and visual arts, and make pottery whenever I can. Growing up across different places as a “cultural nomad” shaped both who I am and who I want to be.